DimOnion - Modern Times

You have to spend money to make money, they say. Preferably, someone else's money, or money that you don't have yet. Or maybe the only way to pay off a debt is to go into debt. Or was it the only way to make money is to go into debt so you can spend money to make money for collateral to go into debt to make money?

The quaint aphorisms of ages past just can't keep up with the complexities of modern times, it seems. To get ahead, you will need to leverage every asset, win every sporting event, ride every wave, and escape on a golden parachute on an inside tip. You might even gerrymander your apartment if it'll put you one step ahead of the next guy.

You come from a very long line of shrewd rulers, after all. And just like in ages past, ingrates flood the streets, only this time, instead of pitchforks they wield cardboard signs and iPhones, which they use to Tweet and Facebook their petty grievances.They have iPhones and they're complaining! Those ingrates! You're sure they would make a U.N. resolution against job creators if they could, but luckily, your man's on the inside and not theirs. To hell with them. If they won't work for minimum wage, someone in another hemisphere will for half that, hopefully less. Health Insurance? Over... someone's dead body, preferably theirs.

You could buy up every foreclosed house in town, and that may make you content for a while, but there are bigger fish to fry. And to fry fish, you need oil. Not vegetable oil - no, what you need is sweet, succulent petroleum, mother's milk, honey of the gods, ambrosia, aqua vitae, dino juice, Arabian gold, Tehran Tea... it has many names, but with any luck, it will serve only one master: you.

Those oil fields might only last another 10-20 years, but that's half a lifetime from now and you're pushing 50. They say meek may inherit the Earth (or what's left of it), but that's not your problem. Live it up while the living's good, chief executive. These modern times move fast.
(Cross-posted at the Dominion strategy forum.)

Yes, I'm at it again. Another fan set for Dominion, this currently quite oversized at 33 cards.

Be sure to look at the full resolution image at http://mtaur.deviantart.com/art/Modern-Times-412030527. Even if you enlarge the image above, you won't be able to read the fine print on a lot of them.

Oil Field is probably game-breakingly snowballerrific. Debt might be a horribly volatile mechanic, but I have some hope that it can be reined in. Amazon + The Consolidator may be the strongest combo on the board, depending on what else you've got throwing Debts at you. For those of you not looking to rack up Dept, perhaps get a Gas Station or three, some extra buys, and a lot of basic Treasures.

I hope to play test this soon. It will likely need tweaks large and small.

DimOnion - Halloween

Just in time. Well, not if you actually wanted to actually print them out and play them, but oh well.

Disclaimers and so on at my deviantart page for this creation.

I really just took the fun mechanics of Dominion and very literally and single-mindedly tried to figure out what these famous archetypes would do in this setting.  Smashing things together and smoothing out kinks is 85% of it, and the other 15% is MS paint (yes, I know, I am a ruffian).

Miley Sivir - Riot Plz Don't

You know, I've been absolutely expecting misogynistic trash from Riot's splash team on this one, but this exceeds even my expectations. Congratulations, Riot. You practically made the joke for me:

Riot pls: Don't break Sivir's spine

(The following is about League of Legends. Some of the context is here.)

The visual upgrade for Sivir is up on the PBE. I don't know whether they'll be updating her splash art or not, but I've been very nervous that they might give her the Escher Girls treatment ever since the first announcements several months ago that they were working on her.

Here's her current splash, which looks pretty good to me.

Like most of the male champions, she's shown in the process of doing something in the way that a normal human would. There's nothing wrong with her spine, and her torso appears to have sufficient room for organs. These are things we can't really take for granted:

Miss Fortune. Sure, she's a nympho pirate hunter, but she looks a bit unwell here.

Soraka. She used to be the only adult human female who looked over 35 years old, but then they broke her back and made her into a teenager instead.

Morgana on death's door.

Anyway, I fixed those some time ago in Paint. Sort of. They're obvious Paint jobs, but at least they're not dying anymore:

And one more. I didn't fix this one, but I showed you what Elise would look like standing up.  I can't believe that people fap to this:

Anyway, giggity giggity, spine porn.  It's really freaking weird.  We know you're doing it on purpose.  Please stop it.

- MTaur

Riot Pls - League of Legends needs a Wind Fish

I briefly alluded to The Wind Fish in my previous post.  This guy right here:

The Wind Fish! (in name only, for it is neither - so the saying goes!) (Source photo came from here)

A Google image search for Wind Fish can brighten any day in about ten minutes.

He's essentially a Buddhist humpback whale in outer space. (Comically undersized wings thrown in for good measure.)

What does this have to do with LoL?

The story is right here.  In February 2012, IronStylus had a big post about Leona, his dream job at Riot, and his dream marriage.  He went so far as to say that he was so happy that it sometimes made him afraid that it was all a dream he might wake up from at any moment.  When another commenter speculated about the metaphysical implications for the rest of us, I immediately posted the above picture in the comments (the image has since been deleted from the servers as a part of periodic cleanup), since basically the whole conversation up until then was one big spoiler for the ending of Link's Awakening.

Anyway, IronStylus's reaction speaks for itself:

I... do not have a clue in my brain as to what this may be...However I am sobbing uncontrollably with what I can only describe as "the purest of joys".

Ok, but what does this have to do with LoL?

Alright, so my hope is that the Wind Fish is still vivid in the mind of IronStylus, and that he's been, at the very least, marinating this inspiration for some kind of support champion.  Not necessarily a whale in outer space, but certainly a breathtaking, otherworldly manifestation of cosmic benevolence.

Problem 1:  Riot does not want to promote passive and defensive playing.  Soraka is the closest thing to The Wind Fish that LoL has right now, and she's already in a slightly marginalized spot and facing a bit of scrutiny from Riot, even after she was reworked some time ago to be a stronger CC source and a weaker healing bot.  Finding a way to communicate the "cosmic benevolence" theme within the constraints of Riot's philosophy of active, aggressive, and well-paced gameplay could be a major challenge.

Problem 2: The other issue is that any potential Wind Fish champion would be somewhat thematically redundant with Soraka - she sort of fits the Wind Fish concept, but her Wind Fish factor is about a 6 or 7, while I would love to see it turned up to 11.  Seeing as both Vayne and Lucian both fit the Batman archetype (i.e., the vengeful hunter of dark things in the night), my feeling is that a Wind Fish champion could be sufficiently differentiated from Soraka in theme, role, lore, and the rest.

If Riot were to roll out a Wind Fish champion as the centerpiece of a Support QoL rework, there would not be enough Fry memes to contain my glee.  I know that the process is lengthy and prone to delays and returns to the drawing board, but I can hope The Wind Fish is working his magic behind the scenes even now.

Fingers crossed,

MTaur

SKT wins LoL World Finals

Well, I was wrong.

Here's what actually happened. SKT won, 3-0.

It's hard for me to say what exactly Royal Club did wrong, but they clearly lost the laning phase every game. Apparently I underestimated holes in their laning game. I don't know what exactly those holes are, but they lost almost every dragon - but this may just be another symptom and not a cause in itself.

A few things I noticed:

1)  Royal Club was still clearly one of the best teamfighting teams in the league, even in the 3-0 showing. They even pulled off one of their unlikely aces that had the potential to turn the game around, but SKT kept their cool and didn't let it happen twice in a row.  Royal Club were just leaking gold too much to cash in on their fighting skills.  On the other hand, SKT was clearly was prepared for this, often managing to disengage from dives where other teams would've gotten sucked into an ace before they figured out what was happening to them.  They only got aced that one time.

2)  In between my blog prediction and when the match occurred, I heard several shoutcasters and pro players mention that SKT was playing a bit off at semifinals.  That was the only SKT match I watched very closely at all as of then, so I was thrown off.

It was somewhat odd to see SKT win by taking control of everything but teamfights.  It's an example of the asymmetric outcomes and strategies that can occur in higher-level play.  Winning a game while avoiding teamfights is a bit of a thousand cuts approach, but even then, SKT did win one of the three games in 20 minutes.

All aboard the Korean hype train. I hope Riot starts featuring them as well as China on lolesports.com in Season 4.

(I'm also hoping for jungler and support QoL improvements, as well as a support loosely inspired by The Wind Fish from Link's Awakening... I can dream about that last one, I suppose.)

Bougeois Francais! (from the SKT vs NJS semifinal match)

First, pictures:

(We made it to the fan poster page. Also, Nientonsoh signed my B.F. Sword.)

The short version of what the sign means: "It[, the B.F. in B.F. Sword,] stands for Bourgeois Francais. While the working class often has to make do with a longsword or a pickaxe, this basic weapon is quite popular among the French middle class."

The long version, since I'm fairly sure that almost no one at the game got the joke except for this one cool kid who probably wasn't old enough to drink (I'm 31): "Bourgeois" means "middle-class", and the concept is sort of a big deal in the Communist thinking of Karl Marx; in his view, they're afforded a higher income at the expense of the "proletariat," or working class. "Francais" means French. Since the B.F. Sword weighs in at 1550 gold, it is decidedly a mid-grade item, and one of the most expensive basic items in the game. Thus it makes perfect sense that it would be a very popular weapon among the Bourgeois, who (unlike the elite) can't afford its upgraded forms, Infinity Edge or The Bloodthirster.

Anyway, enough of that.

Christine and I went to the (League of Legends Season 3) semifinal match between Najin Sword and SK Telecom 1. It was a good match that went to 5 games out of 5. Ultimately, the team who deserved to win did so - in my opinion as a lowly Silver V player (I'm CountBuffon on the NA server).

I'm not super familiar with either team, so it could have just been an off day. But man, did Najin Sword lose by throwing. Often when watching high-level playing, I don't even see any particular mistakes from the losing team; the team who loses looks great to me, and the winning team just won by being even more super-humanly good in ways that I only begin to understand by watching the slow-motion replays. This is how the quarterfinal match between Royal Club and OMG looked to me.

Najin Sword, on the other hand, just derped around and got caught a lot. They had a lot of good moves and were often great in teamfights, but they just got caught a lot. They also threw the last match pretty decisively, as pointed out by the shoutcasters: NJS's Shen ulted Ahri for no good reason, broadcasting to the entire SKT team that Ahri was going to engage, giving Orianna plenty of help in setting up a three-player ultimate.

My low-level thinking about the final is that Royal Club is going to win the whole thing. I thought OMG looked great in the group stage, and I was amazed at how Royal Club shut them down so hard, just inching forward by very small amounts before winning one or two teamfights and opening the floodgates and smashing the Nexus. On the other hand, with SKT having so much trouble with Najin Sword, it just seems impossible that they would be able to beat Royal Club. SKT looked good in the group stage, though, so it might be a good game. I'm predicting a win for Royal Club, and I wouldn't be surprised by a blowout.