Tensei

Uh, try like the entirety of the middle ages and much of the renaissance as well? Instrumental music was long considered blasphemous by Catholicism. Hell, the Homeric epics were (probably) supposed to be sung!

Absolutely fucking nothing happened to music. People say this kind of stuff every generation, and it's always equally false (or true). The 90s had plenty of dumb eurodance/house/boyband crap that was universally loathed by people who grew up in the 70s-80s, just like how nowadays the 90s generation loves to hate on mainstream dubstep and hiphop. The reason that the 90s SEEM better to you is because you're remembering it with a healthy dose of childhood nostalgia, and you probably don't even remember most of the really bad/mediocre stuff they played anyway, just because it was so forgettable.

This is only partially true. Prices for new games are comparable to many other services and stores, and sometimes even higher. Steams success stems mainly from the fact that you can buy, download and install all your games within a single interface which doubles as non-intrusive DRM, which altogether makes it much more attractive than piracy. Saving money is rarely the main factor that drives pirates, convenience or avoiding intrusive DRM is much more important.

Actually I think in most cases piracy exists out of convenience. Valve has more or less proven that this is the case for videogames; stuff on Steam still costs money, but it's much much easier to just buy and download it there than having to find a torrent and crack it. Hell, they turned RUSSIA into a profitable market for their videogames. I bet that if more people had access to something like Netflix, and Netflix had a wider selection of movies viewable online, that would do more to counter movie piracy than anything else (including SOPA).

Invoker is in, and he friggin owns.

http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=006385 http://nedroid.com/ http://questionablecontent.net/

If I'm soloqueueing I just pick a toolbox hero that can fit in any lane/role (something like Windrunner or Mirana). Sniper is alright if you can rely on your teammates to CC and initiate, but that won't be the case most of the time.

Tidehunters new ult animation that plays when he's on low health. Goddamn I love this patch though. Sick buffs to STR carries like Dragon Knight, Skelly King and Kunkka, Rod of Atos and cheaper Orchid indirectly help out INT carries, and Axe is manlier than ever.

All these changes are great but probably my favorite addition are the LoL-style pixel art minimap hero icons, as seen here. Can't wait to play again!

I'm really sorry for not meeting more people, even though I would have loved to, but I was dealing with a combination of persistent jetlag and what was probably a light form of food poisoning (Chipotle/Seafood). Maybe next year. I did manage to catch the OCAD panel and get some of those delicious pony shots at least!

Drunk Lukethexjesse stumbling into our room, ripping off his shirt and headbanging to iron maiden was pretty damn amazing, and we only just got here.

Yeah I probably won't be playing for the next two weeks or so, since I'm in the US now. Then again, maybe MAG will have a LAN set up?

That test WAS legit but that delay got fixed in the October 27th patch, the video is almost 2 months old. You can test it out for yourself by going into a practice game and casting Sandkings Burrowstrike (one of the rare skills with no cast time) straight ahead of you. The difference with HoN (for me at least) is almost negligible. E: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/dota-guide-valve.php

It's possible that what you guys perceive as lag are basically the different upswing animations for spells and attacks, combined with turning speed. Certain heroes like Lina or Batrider are balanced around their attack animation being extremely shitty, with their spells making up for it. There are in fact very few spells that have no windup time whatsoever. Turning speed definitely matters as well; it will take quite a bit longer to cast a spell/attack something directly behind you than in front of you, which is something of a measure to prevent ranged carries with a slowing attack from kiting enemies nonstop. The shop really is unintuitive, but at this point I'm kind of starting to doubt whether it's even possible to make a good shop interface with that many items. One really nice thing about it is that it's possible to edit your recommended items from ingame (there's an edit button at the top left of the shop), so if you do that for every hero, you won't even need to maneuver through the shop itself anymore. Also yes, Skeleton King owns, and it surprises me how fun to play a hero with only one active skill can be. Also has the best guide.

Current Invoker actually happens to be one of the strongest competitive picks in the game for the sheer versatility he gets with 10 spells, and Morphling was THE go-to carry for quite a long time. I don't think that unique concepts and competitive viability are necessarily mutually exclusive. I suppose it's true that recent heroes in both Dota and HoN haven't had playstyles that were completely off the wall unique like Meepo, but there is still quite a lot of room for crazy innovation. The most recent example I can think of is Tresdin, whose ult forces him and an enemy to autoattack each other for something like 5 seconds. If either of them dies, the winner of the duel will permanently gain 10 bonus damage, which is pretty much unlike any other hero in Dota. E: Also, they're basically making a 1:1 port of WC3 DotA in the first place, so even heroes like Techies and Meepo will eventually make it in, competitively viable or not.

I dunno, do you have a concrete example of a skill where this happened? I feel like in both HoN and Dota, most skills have become increasingly complex. Ancient Apparition is a pretty recent addition to DotA, and the skill description for his ult is absolutely massive because of all the mechanics behind it. Aside from that, a lot of the 'classic' skills that were basically just single-target stuns + damage like Sven's Storm Bolt, or Skeleton King's Hellfire Blast, have gotten some new effects (like adding a small AoE effect or a Slow) It's definitely true that both games appear to be moving away from RNG-based effects like changing a % crit chance to a guaranteed crit that procs every 5 seconds or so.

Yeah there are a couple of heroes that are really straightforward to play (Lich, Lion, Tidehunter) so it's probably best to start with them first. The main thing is that both Lich and Lion have ways of easily replenishing their mana, while Tidehunter is just hard to kill. None of them really require a lot of items to be effective either. E: Oh, and definitely go for some bot games first to get used to the interface and stuff.

"Maybe if you're bad."

Dota 2, maybe Diablo 3.

You know what? I agree. SOPA is symptomatic for larger underlying problems and it doesn't take a genius to see that they'll keep on trying to push something similar through, as they already tried in the past. The Swiss governments stance ("Companies should adapt to new media rather than the other way around") is the right way to look at things IMO. You are all little kids for jumping on the guy without even reading or understanding what he had to say.

I made an OCR channel ingame to make it easier to set up games, if you add "chat_join ocremix" to your autoexec.cfg file it should autojoin whenever you log in.

Yeah, except I never use that argument to say that someone's wrong. E: Anyway, you guys should just 1v1 each other to see who's right.

I suppose it's hard to get multiple people together in the holiday period. Had some good games with capalangley and dhsu yesterday though.

It hasn't been implemented yet for some reason. It's a pretty cool ability though, so the fact that it got buffed maybe means that they'll put it in soon.