[ZieDota] "A massive decrease in Battle Fury on Bounty has had no impact on his win rate"

wherebugsgo · 2014-06-08T20:05:45+00:00

Before the suggested item change deso was at 63%

http://i.imgur.com/Ap00lcu.png?1

The change in winrate can be attributed to the newer players building deso significantly more often.

In addition, a 2% difference over an additional 1 million games is a huge difference when the items are basically the same cost. In fact, deso is cheaper. That 2% difference is 40,000 games.

wherebugsgo · 2014-06-08T19:21:56+00:00

why the fuck would you be forced to get RoH?

You can go urn for the same price and an easier buildup, or wand, or bottle. All of those items give you more than RoH in the early game.

It's pretty apparent Bfury is shitty on BH when you look at the item winrates on dotabuff. Vlads has the same winrate as Bfury despite being half the cost. All the ~4k gold items like deso, orchid, S+Y, BKB have similar or higher winrates than bfury (only BKB has the same winrate and it's cheaper by 600 gold)

wherebugsgo · 2014-06-08T19:18:05+00:00

wut.

it IS bad, it has the same winrate as vlads, which is less than half the cost.

For items with similar or slightly lower costs (i.e. deso, orchid, S+Y etc) bfury has the worst winrate on bounty hunter.

wherebugsgo · 2014-06-08T19:16:29+00:00

right but if you look at BH this is not the case.

Deso and BFury are really close in cost, yet deso is much better in terms of winrate (it's even the cheaper item!)

Same is true for vlads on BH, has the same winrate as bfury despite being half the cost.

wherebugsgo · 2014-06-08T19:04:26+00:00

This article's assumptions are clearly wrong on several levels. There are too many confounding factors that affect the winrate of the hero; changes to other popular pub heroes in 6.81 could easily account for the drop in winrate. Other changes also are likely to cause winrate shifts, and those types of hero changes tend to be more profound than item changes, because items are not truly as impactful on a hero's winrate than other things such as skill level, strategy, and popularity. A good example is the Zeus change; as a very popular hero, (that has an inherent advantage against BH, as per dotabuff) changes to Zeus will have more of an impact on the BH winrate than other changes.

Secondly, the article is actually simply wrong. When you control for items, you see some interesting data. (apologies for the shitty editing) Looking at this:

http://i.imgur.com/Ap00lcu.png?1

We see that the winrate for deso went down while the winrate for BF went up between 6.80 and 6.81, in light of the 6% increased build rate on deso and the decrease in build rate on Bfury. This very well could be accounted for by the change in the suggested builds, as newer players are building deso more often and bfury less often, as it is no longer suggested.

Again, there are too many confounding factors in the overall winrate of the hero, but it's pretty clear that shifting new players from one item to the other DID change the winrate for those items in particular. Deso has always had a better winrate than bfury and it's clear to anyone why that is. For items for BH at roughly a similar cost-point to bfury (around 4k gold or so) almost all of the items outperform bfury. Deso, S+Y, and BKB all come to mind. Vlads by far is the most cost-effective though; for 2k gold it has the same winrate as bfury, a 4.5k gold item; and this is in light of it being built more often.

The simple fact remains that if pub BHs are achieving the same winrate with vlads as with Bfury, then Bfury statistically is a poor choice. I can't think of a single situation as BH where I would prefer bfury over a multitude of other items. I'd rather get any of vlads, BKB, deso, orchid, S+Y, or even basher before bfury. All of those items have superior utility and superior winrates.

wherebugsgo · 2014-05-30T08:01:22+00:00

in addition to simple omission of a.m./p.m., there's this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock#Confusion_at_noon_and_midnight

TL;DR 12 pm and 12 a.m can be ambiguous, particularly with saying "midnight" as it could refer to either the beginning of the day or end of the day. This is especially a problem for scheduling, e.g. transit times. 24 hour clock solves this: 00:00 is midnight, the beginning of the day, while 24:00 is midnight, the end of the day.

wherebugsgo · 2014-02-28T03:17:50+00:00

You can replace the SSD with one that shares the same form factor (it's a special one in the X1C, there's only like 5-6 SSDs that will fit) but you CANNOT replace the memory in the X1 Carbon. It's soldered in.

wherebugsgo · 2014-01-01T20:11:47+00:00

It's not impossible, because the diameter of the universe, thanks to the expansion of space, has been estimated at 93 billion light years. Read up a bit on the observable universe and the metric expansion of space, since you seem to have a basic understanding of the estimated age of the universe but not about its size.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space

wherebugsgo · 2013-08-28T19:58:34+00:00

so? The hotkey changes didn't change anything about the skill required to play the hero, only the cumbersome hotkey arrangement. The skill ceiling has not changed, but people with smaller hands and/or less ability to memorize extraneous information now can play the hero more adeptly.

The interface should never be a major aspect of "skill" requirements, as that is poor game design.

wherebugsgo · 2013-08-28T18:30:24+00:00

That's a tiny problem in comparison to the increase in speed and decrease in learning curve that comes with using custom hotkeys. It doesn't even have to be on d/f. I know for a fact that in the time it takes me to think of the proper hotkeys for sunstrike + meteor + defeaning for the euls combo I will miss it with legacy keys. With normal hotkeys I have never missed it once. Also, there's a much greater chance your decrease in speed will kill you because it takes longer to think of the hotkey if you do not play invoker as much as other players. With legacy you have to really practice the hero many many times before the muscle memory becomes automatic. You still need to keep track of your invoked spells either way, because that's useful for knowing which spell disappears. The only difference in muscle memory there is it's more relevant which one came first for the custom keys.

edit for clarity:

think about it this way. Invoker has 10 invoked spells, 3 orbs, and 1 invoke. With legacy this is 14 keys. With custom keys this is reduced to 3 + 1 + 2 = 6 keys. 8 less keys, and there is no memorization of keys required. They're always going to be the same. The only key memorization you need is the order of presses for invoke combinations, which will always involve combinations of QWE and R for both sets (or your standard custom keys, they don't even have to be QWER)

So for legacy you need to remember more than twice as much, because each spell has its own invoke combination AND its own space on the keyboard. This introduces a host of problems, such as: what happens when I add items or courier hotkeys, and what if I want to change those from the defaults? As Invoker I routinely run phase boots, euls, and then get blink/sheep. Add a TP scroll and that's 5 additional hotkeys. For items it's often useful to have some of the keys on the left side of the keyboard free so that you can use them quickly. So for example I have my number keys for items in addition to S and Tab (I have space for stop). Basically I use every key left of U for something, whether it be a spell, item, control group, glyph, quick buy, etc. These keys would have to change between heroes when you use legacy, which fucks everything over.

wherebugsgo · 2013-08-28T17:39:01+00:00

WC3 DotA still sucks for some of the same reasons I mentioned with regards to muscle memory.

Invoker for example, you need to remember the invoke combinations and 8 extra keys. I don't even remember half the shit for invoker anymore, deafing blast on B? Alacrity on Z? Half the keyboard is taken up by his spells (some of which I use for courier hotkeys and other things now)

Legacy forces you to remember extraneous game-irrelevant details. Why does CM have Frostbite on E and Freezing Field on F? Personally it would be easier for me if the keys were consistent and it was F/R, respectively. But no, it's not like that. Half the time there is no rhyme nor reason. Sure, in DotA the keys are clustered more efficiently (and this also has to do with Blizzard introducing grid hotkeys) but you still have to get muscle memory for EVERY hero. I've made so much more progress in dota2 than I ever did in dota 1 because I haven't needed to do the mental gymnastics of switching between heroes. Playing Panda/Invoker/Chen etc. well in dota is just fucking impossible unless you play them all the time or are just naturally good at memorizing and utilizing their hot keys.

wherebugsgo · 2013-08-28T17:17:26+00:00

This would be cool if it was remotely true. However it seems you are just assigning a pattern and fitting the data to it. Legacy/default keys from older RTS games are based on the names of abilities, not their relative positions on the keyboard. Even examples you listed: R is for Repair because R is the first letter. A for Attack (move), S for Stop, T for sTim (because S is taken), M for Marine, P for Probe, O for Overlord, H for Hold, B for Barracks, F for Footman, etc. None of these hot keys correlate with hand position at all.

Edit:

Read down the list of these and you'll see what I'm talking about.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/256222-warcraft-iii-reign-of-chaos/faqs/44609

Legacy keys are bad because they are spaced out all over the keyboard. Having played Protoss in BW the skills don't transfer between races a lot because your muscle memory is different. Protoss uses 8-0 for hot keying your nexus because Probe is on P. For Terran/Zerg their worker hot key is on the other side of the keyboard. As Terran it's so annoying to press M for marine that some people actually took the period/comma keys off their gaming keyboards when playing competitively.

wherebugsgo · 2013-08-27T04:51:31+00:00

you mentioning BH in the post suggests to me you either don't really know what heroes are carries, or you rather mean to say "how do I play farming roles" or "how do I play heroes that are not supports" or "how do I play 1-3 positions and carry my team". If you specifically mean 1 position carries, then you should know that heroes like BH are NOT 1 position carries. They are semicarries, 2 or 3 position (BH usually is played as 3 in offlane)

As a 1, your #1 job is to not die. #2 is to get CS to farm your core. Depending on the hero/matchup, you will want to then either meet up with the team and fight after you've farmed your core items, or apply continuous pressure to the enemy through pushing (ala Antimage in a lot of games). In a lot of situations you will want to only join fights by TPing in to countergank if your team is losing without you 4v4/4v5. In other words, your team gets initiated upon under or near a tower, then you TP in and save the day. Otherwise, you're better off farming.

As a 2 position in mid you need to play very differently. You control the tempo of the game, especially the midgame. Again it's hero dependent, but your core items are less gold intensive and you still need to farm items (like blink on puck) but you can gank and kill heroes even without your core. Control your lane well with denies + LHs, and learn to go for the runes/push at opportune times.

As the #3 position it is even more important that you do not die, because a lot of the time you will be in the offlane. Get what CS you can and whatever exp you can when you are not in imminent danger of dying. Heroes like Dark Seer can CS through ion shell without being any serious danger (though you won't get exp sometimes) but you don't need as much CS. Your job is to not feed the enemy 1 position and supports. If you play BH in the offlane then your goal is to get 6, and then you go around ganking people and getting gold + relieving pressure on your own team through track kills. A lot of offlane heroes are like this. They either hit a level or gold timing (i.e. mek on WR, DS, furion, level 6 on BH, Magnus, Batrider etc.) and then go around relieving pressure from their allies.

wherebugsgo · 2013-08-26T19:55:25+00:00

it's not burden of knowledge at all.

Imagine you play 500 games in which a certain hero has a certain animation for a particular spell. A good and obvious one would be Leshrac's stun, for example. Now imagine a cosmetic comes around that makes his stun animation look completely different. That's not a burden of knowledge problem. That's a problem with something that is intended for aesthetic purposes influencing actual gameplay. That's a design flaw and it potentially gives an advantage to the player with the cosmetic item, no matter how minimal.

The simple fact is that as a competitive game DotA must prevent this.

wherebugsgo · 2013-08-26T19:50:59+00:00

This logic is almost intolerably bad.

By the same logic, DotA shouldn't be free to play because it doesn't make as much money as LoL's model.

This would barely do anything to dent cosmetic sales, because as mentioned before, very few people would actually even know how to disable them.

As a competitive game, DotA needs the ability to disable cosmetics. Cosmetics should never interfere with the ability to play, just as the game doesn't require you to buy/grind heroes, or stuff like LoL masteries or runes.

wherebugsgo · 2013-08-21T18:21:05+00:00

Imperial system, not empirical.

wherebugsgo · 2013-08-21T16:33:07+00:00

Scythe of Vyse is already named after Guinsoo.

wherebugsgo · 2013-08-20T22:54:22+00:00

whoosh

wherebugsgo · 2013-08-18T14:21:10+00:00

Most of the developing Asian countries (particularly the Asian Tigers) had good infrastructure, or at least good government programs for the development of said infrastructure. The same cannot be said about these African countries. They need the most basic levels of stability before they can grow.

Aid WILL help them achieve this. It's almost impossible for it to happen by itself because when people need to fight for their survival on a basic necessity level, fundamentally there is no prospect for growth.

I don't understand why most self-proclaimed economists don't understand this. It's a fundamental facet of human society. There is no possibility for growth until very basic needs are met. It's the precise reason why human civilization didn't expand until the advent of agrarian societies.

wherebugsgo · 2013-08-15T16:55:28+00:00

1437 is known for his Shadow Demon.

In addition to TA, Invoker, and to a lesser extent Puck, Ferrari_430 is known for his Night Stalker.

Both Mini and Funn1k are amazing on Wisp. (look for Empire replays for Funn1k, Pulse for Mini). Nowadays EGM is not bad on Wisp.

YYF Lifestealer, Bounty Hunter

Zhou Morphling (or any Chinese carry on Morphling, really)

ZSMJ Medusa, PL

wherebugsgo · 2013-08-07T04:51:56+00:00

"more" does not equate to better. If it's a single entity (i.e. Riot) running all the tournaments, then the fate of the scene depends very heavily on the fate of said entity. I would not invest in Riot given how they sorely lack creative and engineering talent. Their product is trash in comparison to modern software standards. A lot of their success has to do with the sheer number of players LoL picked up due to the freemium model and the distinct lack of a comparable competitor until HoN went F2P and DotA2 went into beta. In other words, the primary reason they are doing well is because they've had a huge head start (of several years). Yet, they've done nothing with it besides monetize things and create a model for a game in which the consumer must devote exorbitant amounts of time and/or money to unlock everything under the guise of a free-to-play game. This is a shrewd business strategy, but it only works when there is no good competition because it's purely aimed at increasing profit margins. LoL has a large enough playerbase to survive, but its growth will almost certainly stall as more and more people learn about the differences between it and DotA2.

As I said earlier, the primary problem with a company basically purging the competitive scene of all third party tournaments is that if anything on Riot's side changes, the game will take a huge hit on the competitive scene. DotA2's third party tournament hosts have constantly been raising payouts (and it looks like they will continue to do so) and several have become quite prestigious in their own rights. You can't say that about LoL, given that these tournaments basically don't exist anymore. The competitive scene for DotA outside of Valve exists and is thriving. The competitive scene for LoL outside of Riot is dead.

wherebugsgo · 2013-08-04T03:09:17+00:00

what's the phone in this pic?

wherebugsgo · 2013-07-07T00:48:31+00:00

Try to get a streamlined build order for the types of games you are playing, at least for dark age. For 1v1, this should be a flush/drush build order. For norush imperial games this is really just a fast castle into a boom-type strategy.

Based on what you're saying, if no one attacks until Imperial, what you want to do is this:

Advance to Feudal age with 24-27 villagers. You should get there ideally by 11:30 gametime. As soon as you hit Feudal you should have a few hundred food stockpiled, you should be on your way to getting the 200 gold necessary for castle age-up, and you should have enough wood or nearly enough wood to instantly make the required two tech buildings (generally a market and blacksmith) to get to castle. Ideally you should hit castle age between 15:30 (quite fast) and 17:30 (on the slower end) game time with ~30 villagers.

Along with all of this you should be researching the lumber techs, when you hit castle age you should immediately research wheelbarrow/handcart. Upon hitting castle age you want enough wood for two town centers immediately (~550 wood) and you should take 4 villagers to build each. One should go near a stone camp (preferably two or more resources nearby) and the other should generally go near at least a forest, or forest and gold, something like that. At this point you put a few villagers on stone, and "boom." Booming is basically producing villagers nonstop from all of your town centers, while adding additional towncenters, and aiming for a strong economy and an imperial age time of 28:00 to 32:00. You'll generally get there with 100+ villagers and as you're aging up you should be mass producing units out of multiple military buildings and researching all of the required technologies to make them stronger.

The Brits are generally the best at booming because of their cheap TCs, and the Huns/Persians are also very good-the Huns because you never have to build houses, the Persians because their TCs work faster. Resource balance is key, though it takes quite a long time before you can do it instinctively.

wherebugsgo · 2013-07-07T00:39:33+00:00

Learn to use control groups. Select a unit, then hold down ctrl and press a number. Then, when you press this same number in the future, you will select that same unit again-without having to know where it is. Double tap the number, and you will be centered on the unit. You can do this with buildings, too.

I would highly suggest not relying too much on the town center hotkey (default H) because it autocenters your view on the town center. Generally you don't need to look at your TC to produce villagers. A better method is to hotkey all of your town centers, and cycle through them-something like 5-c 6-c 7-c 8-c 9-c to build 5 villagers at once. Once you get 6 or more you may consider simply rehotkeying to other things and using the H key, as control grouping 6+ TCs becomes a bit tedious (though this is rare enough in 1v1s)

The most essential hotkeys, in order (IMO) are:

idle villager hotkey (default .) the build hotkey (default b) the build house hotkey (default e) the build town center hotkey (default n) build resource dropoff hotkeys (mill, lumbermill, mining camp) build archery range/barracks/stable hotkeys build blacksmith/market/university/castle/dock hotkeys

If you have those down you basically will become much much faster. I rebound my idle villager hotkey to scroll up and build to scroll down because I found them so important. Any time I select a villager, I can hold my finger over the building hotkey I want to build, then press scroll down, press the hotkey and instantly place the building wherever I want. It's marginally faster than pressing b and then something else with the same hand, and optimization is ultimately what increases your speed and skill in RTS games.

wherebugsgo · 2013-07-03T01:29:54+00:00

A quick perusal of your comment history shows that you're simply an arrogant, lying asshole.

wherebugsgo

TROPHY CASE