zircon

Great advice in there. BTW, Jeff and I were thinking about doing a lane swap for ranked 5s. So, I would mid and he would ADC.

OK, I played a match today against a pretty good Vel'koz. Once he gets his ult, he's a little scary against low mobility champs like Syndra. If I stun him first, I can generally kill him, but the reverse is also true (assuming he lands his skillshots). Also... I'm Gold! Hooray!!!

Well, Kat's ult is the same way, no? Except with that you also have to be at point-blank range. She's still viable.. mostly. So, I can imagine Vel's ult can work as well, particularly in comps where you can lock them down for a couple seconds (Leona / Malphite / Wukong etc) I suppose time will tell if there is reason to be afraid of him. On a related note, I am very close to reaching Gold by playing Syndra almost exclusively (with a bit of Orianna mixed in). I'm on Game 2 of my Gold promo series with 1W 0L.

Hmm, I think Vel has more range and damage than Karthus. Sure, Karthus has Q, but he kinda needs to be close to do his true potential with Defile. Plus Vel has a knockup (hard CC) which Karthus doesn't. Still...

Definitely! I'm waiting for Reaper of Souls to jump back in. I figure I'll start a fresh character and enjoy building things up again. Anyone else in?

Nope, it IS different now. Monsters now level up with you all the time, so Act 1 and Act 4 are in theory the same difficulty at any given point. However, now you can select a difficulty before entering the game (and lower it in-game). This increases the overall challenge and rewards. Once you hit level 60, you unlock Torment, which has 6 levels of difficulty within that. So basically it's a tweaked version of Monster Power that no longer requires you to play through the game THREE times to unlock every difficulty. It's just there from the beginning, which is cool.

So far I'm not too scared of him, from the one game I played vs. a fairly fed Vel'koz. As Syndra (can you tell I like Syndra?) I can kinda just stun and kill him, and he can't really escape. Edit: Did I mention Syndra is really good?

Vlad has been nerfed in many ways over time, along with his core items like Will of the Ancients, Spirit Visage, etc. Riot has said that he's an example of a badly-designed champ. They want him to be a little underpowered at BEST, because he would just be impossible to deal with otherwise. I agree he's particularly weak right now and there just isn't much point in picking him.

IMO his problems involve range, cooldowns, and lack of AOE. Take a look at Syndra. She basically does everything Veigar does but better. Her primary attack (Q) has more range, more damage, better scaling, and an AOE effect. It also has a 4s cooldown at all ranks. Veigar has his meteor ability, which DOES hurt. But it's also kinda easy to dodge. Syndra's Force of Will (W) also does high damage, but has more range, more utility, and a shorter cooldown (!). Syndra's E is yet another AOE nuke, and combined with Q is an insanely long-range AOE stun / poke / nuke. This too is on a shorter cooldown than Veigar's E, and has the bonus effect of pushing people back. It's a better skill in basically every respect - range, speed, surprise, aoe, damage, etc. Lastly, her R - though it does not scale off enemy AP - is blisteringly strong. It has MORE range at rank 3, a shorter cooldown, and actually can do more damage if you have more spheres out. In short, if I want a mage that can AOE stun, nuke, and blow a single target up, I will pick Syndra every time. Ultra-low cooldowns, extremely high damage (both AOE and single target), and insane range that can practically extend the whole screen. Veigar is sadly outclassed here

The question is posed, "Do VGM Soundtracks Add Substance to the Games they Come From?"? Derrit takes a look at Frozen Synapse and Dust to find the answer! ALSO - we have our first LIVE RADIO SHOW (& podcast) tonight at 9pm EST on 8bitx! http://8bitx.com/ Join myself, Will Strouse, and Larry Oji for a live chat and great tunes. It's gonna be fun!

I mentioned this on Facebook, and to OA, but I've made a couple big changes. One, I've transitioned closer to a paleo diet. Not doing it 100% because I don't have the patience/willpower, but I'm definitely getting into the groove of an eggs&bacon breakfast, grass fed beef / chicken breasts for lunch, broccoli + cauliflower, coconut oil & ghee instead of other stuff... etc. Honestly, I don't feel much of a difference compared to when I ate a lot more carbs / grains. More full, maybe. But I don't have any digestive problems at least. The main thing is that I decided to start working with a personal trainer. We did two sessions so far and I'm loving it. The plan is two 1 hour sessions per week; upper body & lower body. Maybe expanding beyond that later, we'll see. Having a trainer relieves me from having to THINK about working out. I have my appointment, so I just go and the guy tells me what to do. It's perfect. Being self employed I often feel like I have to spend a lot of my willpower just staying focused on work... and it's doubly hard when that's creative work. We're focusing on muscle building exclusively. The trainer knows his stuff, I think. He's like 55 and built like a tank, benches 500+, squats 600+. It's nuts. He has a simple philosophy that if you want to get strong, there aren't shortcuts. Lift heavy stuff. And that's perfect for me. After the first two sessions I was completely sore all over, but it felt great, and that's what I want - to be put through the ringer by someone else! I'm actually *looking forward* to future sessions. I can hardly believe it.

Say you put a little animation around someone when Hurricane's active is available. The counterplay is that it only works when you're RIGHT up against that person, and it could be baited out. Plus it wouldn't be true CC, just a knockback (with maybe like 0.25 duration from starting to ending position). The champions who benefit most from Runaan's right now are those with on-hit effects. Kog'maw in particular (his W applies to all targets), but also Varus for example. These guys have a critical problem that if people stick to them, they can't get away. So, the active would synergize with their playstyle.

Random late night theorycrafting: wouldn't it be cool if Runaan's Hurricane had an active ability? I was thinking something that would push enemy champions within ~150 units (or so) away, by maybe 200-300 units. The issue with Runaan's, among other things, is that you have to be close to use it. AD carries generally don't want to get in close, because they don't want to get jumped on. An active ability like this could be used to instantly get people off your back and let you get in 1-2 more shots (or run away). But the item would still be sub-optimal for damage, and a situational pick.

Servers just pooped themselves but I'm on throughout the evening.

Thinking along another line, I really like the idea (suggested elsewhere) of having an "MVP" for each team in each game. The gist is that after each game, you pick someone on your team (but NOT yourself) who you think was best or contributed the most. If you were required to do it, or got a reward for doing it optionally, then it could tie into the honor system or have cosmetic rewards. This could also be interesting to promote players who are consistently doing well.

No, but it should soften the loss / gain of LP. Yes it is. Or more accurately, it's a reliable indicator (when combined with other stats) of how close the game is. Teams that put up a good fight should be rewarded more than teams that don't, and crushing the enemy team should be worth more than winning because one person threw. This stuff is absolutely measurable. In all my time of playing league, I think I can count on one hand the # of times that we had a "close game" with a huge gold difference, or a stomp when the gold was very close. Throw that in with the other available stats and you could tweak the LP algorithm nicely.

Yeah, I can live with that. To me, the most frustration is when you play well and someone throws it. i.e. An otherwise close game should result in less LP gained/loss, compared to a game where you dominate (or lose) due to overall strong play. That's just my take on it though. Like I said the other day ingame, I can live with being outplayed. But I hate losing because one idiot gets caught out of position.

At the end of the day, I think Riot does have the data to see what statistics correlate most strongly with winning. Look at it this way: if we're watching a replay, and we skip to 1 minute from the end of the game, we can most likely make a very good & accurate prediction as to who is winning / who will win. We're capable of doing that based on things like team gold, towers down, team kills, etc. Riot's team is smart: they can put this type of thing into an algorithm that can probably predict things even better than humans can. Once they have a formula or algorithm that predicts victory with some degree of certainty based on the numbers at end-of-game, they can compare that to the actual result. So let's say the system thinks a team has an 80% chance of victory based on previous data, and that team wins. Great! Normal LP gains/losses. But if the system thinks it's 50-50, maybe the LP should reflect that it was a really close game and not a clear stomp. Or what if a team had a very low predicted chance of victory but managed to win anyway? That should be reflected too.

True, it CAN be skewed, but it's pretty rare to see one player skew the *team* gold so much that it would appear like an even game when it actually isn't. Yeah, once in awhile someone will go 23-0 or something like that, but if they do then they're probably helping everyone else as well (ganks -> objectives / free farm). Surely the vast majority of the time, a game where one team has 22k gold and the other has 14k gold is more of a clear victory/loss than one where both teams are hovering around 22k. You could even go a step further and look at if one player is skewing it and take that into account as well.

Of that stuff, I thought the team gold earned was a particularly interesting one. Generally speaking, gold earned as a team correlates strongly to how well everyone is doing.

No problem.

I guarantee 100% none of these losses are even close to my fault. I know what tilting is, and I know what it's like to end games 3-5-7 etc. I'm talking about games where I do everything I possibly can, and people THROW IT. Like just now, I had a game where: 1. The enemy team was clearly doing baron. I pinged not to go, I explicitly said "Don't go to baron", and 2 people went anyway and died. 2. Our ADC tried to fight in a 3v5 when the other 2 on our team clearly were not there (or anywhere close), and he died. 3. Our jungler getting pulled by a Thresh when we had clear vision of the enemy team. Or in another game, I was supporting a Draven who ended 3-11. He would just always walk in front of the team and get killed by the enemy Leona. What can you do about that? Can you ping? Of course! We all did. Can you *nicely* say, "Draven, please stay in back?" Yes! We did that too. Can I, as the support, use ALL of my abilities to prevent him from dying? Yep. But even landing perfect bubbles and tidal waves doesn't matter if the players have such bad awareness that they get caught over and over and over out of position. Mistakes like these have nothing to do with me. I can win my lane, I can gank, I can roam, I can call things and try to get people to play properly. But when they make such incredibly game-throwing mistakes, there is not a damn thing I can do about it. It's just the luck of a draw. In all of my last 10 games, I can't think of a single situation where a mistake I made caused us to lose even an objective, much less the game. In fact I think my playing has been better than ever, particularly in mid. Just ask the people I have been duoing with. You don't understand how bad these players are. I thought Bronze was elo hell but this is somehow much, much worse than I can ever remember. I think it has to do with the S4 reset and people just not being placed at their skill level, so they're making beginner mistakes and terrible decisions.

Eight game losing streak. I hate this game sometimes. Every game I've DOMINATED my lane... roamed, helped other lanes, done objectives, etc. But for some reason in these last EIGHT GAMES I've had people so terrible, SO incredibly bad, that they throw our leads no matter how far ahead we are. I'm talking like going 6/0 in mid or at bot, pushing tower, pushing OTHER towers, getting dragons, and still losing because people are so atrocious at decision-making that they get caught and die over and over and we lose. Just venting. I don't belong in Silver II.

I've just written part 2, now available at our site! Hopefully this addresses some of the questions people were curious about after part 1, and of course we still have part 3 (and maybe 4) to go. http://impactsoundworks.com/optimizing-your-kontakt-workflow-part-2/ Here I cover how different components of your computer affect Kontakt's performance, DFD tweaking, CPU settings (including multicore), bridging options, etc. Excerpt:

Add some of us to your friends list. I'm cubic zirconium.