Author: Jeff Morgan (Page 146 of 260)

All Roads Return to WoW: I want to slap the guy that invented Gear Score

July 22, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

gear-score I finally got my druid to level 80 and I’ve spent the last week or so getting him geared up through heroics and the occasional PUG raid. It’s actually been a lot of fun. I’ve always enjoyed tanking, and despite my relatively little experience doing it, I’d say I’m starting to get fairly skilled at keeping a critter’s attention so my group can kill it.

The problem now, though, is that there isn’t a ton of loot left for me to pick up, and I’d really like to see some more content before the expansion comes out. I thought that would be fairly easy to do, but dear god was I wrong.

According to most information out there, I’m ready to start tanking the 10-man version of Trial of the Crusader. It’s a pretty straightforward zone from what I can tell, and my health pool, avoidance, and overall mitigation should be more than enough. I just have to learn the fights. Unfortunately, the people running those raids are looking for a Gear Score over 5000, and I’m somewhere around 4500. What’s worse, the items that will bump me more than 50 of these arbitrary points per slot are typically from 25-man heroic raids that are no longer being run or the normal modes of raids for which I don’t apparently qualify.

I finally got a guy to ignore the GS issue and let me into a ToC 10 and when our melee pulled the fire from the second boss straight onto me while I was tanking adds and proceeded to follow me around, guess who got kicked? Yeah, it was me.

All Roads Return to WoW

addons gearscore gs raiding raids trial of the crusader warcraft wow

Riot staff should stop trolling

July 21, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

I understand that the crew at Riot is probably a little miffed at all the negative feedback surrounding the launch of Season One. Despite the problems, LoL is still a free game with an impressive feature list, and I’d probably be a bit peeved if people were constantly bitching about this thing I was offering up for free. But trolling isn’t the way to deal with that frustration, and it’s probably going to make things a whole lot worse.

Take this most recent troll post from Zileas, the game’s design director wherein he claims they’ll be making Xin Zhao’s ultimate refresh any time he gets a kill or an assist. It’s a joke, but if you weren’t reading the forums regularly and didn’t know that they were planning to nerf Xin’s ultimate you might easily assume this is real and get fairly pissed off.

Now, some would say it’s the responsibility of the reader to find out what’s real and what’s not – can’t trust everything you read on the internet. I would say, though, that it falls to Riot to keep its forums safe and enjoyable for old and new members alike, and making troll threads just to get a laugh out of the council and the forum regulars doesn’t do any good for the community. If Riot wants new players to get involved in the game and the community on the forums, it has to put an end to this crap.

league of legends

flaming riot troll posts trolling xin zhao buff xin zhao nerf zileas

Level 30 will now be required for ranked play

July 21, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

I am actually astounded it took this long for Riot to make this change, particularly when you consider the kind of data it had available. Granted, these stats were probably taken after the launch of Season One, but it wasn’t exactly uncommon to see players below level 30 matched with those above prior to the Season One launch either.

As Pendragon stated in a post last night, the change was made because players below level 30 tend to leave 4.2 percent of games, versus the 1.1 percent of games from level 30 players. The really interesting stat, though, is that sub-30 players have a staggering 35.2 percent win rate, while those over 30 are seeing an average 52 percent win rate.

Again, I’m shocked it took this long, and the data serves as a pretty embarrassing statement toward Riot’s foresight on this. You should start to see the change today.

league of legends, News

level level 30 level 30 ranked level 30 requirement level 30 stats matchmaking ranked matches ranked play season one statistics

Season One hasn’t fixed matchmaking

July 20, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

I played a few solo 5v5 ranked games today. That’s been my method of late. A few. Not four. Sometimes not even three. Just one or two in a go, and they rarely last longer than 30 minutes anymore. It’s a strange way to play the game, kinda like taking a step back more than six months to when my ELO was fresh and I was just learning to play.

The one game that stuck out today, though, was a game in which the other team didn’t ban Shaco and I got to have a little fun. It started in their woods when I polished off Warwick at level two. I ganked him again as soon as he respawned and made it out of base, netting him three deaths in the first six or seven minutes of the game. My opponent’s other lanes were struggling as well – one because Sion was incredibly over-confident. I wondered what was going on (why we were winning so easily) until I got to the lobby. That Sion? He had one win. One solitary win, and his ELO was more than 150 points below most of my team.

I will say, most of my games have been with players of similar ELO, with a tolerance of maybe 100 points in the worst case. I can live with that. But when my queues are no longer than 25 seconds, it seems like the MM algorithm should be doing a better job than this. As more games are played, there will be an increasing gap between 1200 ELO players and 1450 ELO players. Why matchmaking would ever put those two together, particularly in solo queue, is completely beyond me.

league of legends

broken mm busted mm fail matchmaking matchmaking broken mm mm fail season one

We need more Season One disclosure

July 19, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

I was really excited for Season One – maybe too excited – and I think that excitement led to overblown expectations about the changes to the game. I do think my expectations would have been held more in line, though, if Riot had been more transparent about all of the features/changes to the game and client with the advent of the League’s first competitive season.

Consider a recent thread in which a player asked about the required number of champions for Ranked Play. What’s that? Yes, you are required to have 14 champions unlocked in order to play ranked playlists. I was actually thrilled to find out, but why didn’t we know more about it before? It wasn’t in the patch notes as I can remember (and I tend to read those pretty carefully), nor was it in any of the previews.

The ranking system also includes anti-dispersion code so that a high player and low player can’t queue together to bump the high-ELO player’s rating (this still doesn’t explain how the top 5v5 solo player was more than 200 points above the next player, even though they were known to play with each other (this has changed since Saturday)).

All of this would have been great information for the community. I can understand withholding a few things for the element of surprise, but these little, behind-the-scenes mechanics actually disperse a lot of the rage players stir up with uninformed speculation.