Jomungur

[quote]Contrary to what you see on Mythbusters, one anecdote does not disprove anything. Rather, watch the many, many replays of top level players. See that they all bought XP.[/quote] Agreed about how one anecdote doesn't disprove (or prove) anything, but I'm not sure the replays prove much either. If the replays are of top pre-formed teams playing PUGs, then the win was probably overdetermined: the winning team could have take then the death penalty mitigatio

[quote]I could see the motivation to cause one of these events if you gained $500 every time it happened. Heck, even $5 would be a motivator. I just don't see the lure for it currently... better stats? You get a higher win %? hmm.[/quote] I agree. Doesn't make any sense, and is really pathetic.

[quote]There's a reason why in the olympics you don't see them tying swimmers' arms behind their backs and having them race some out of shape idiot like myself, and nor do they balance relay teams by putting a few crappy runners on each team to keep all the fast guys from teaming up together. When you play a game and get better you expect to fight harder opponents with better partners as you rank up, not to have a bigger and bigger weight tied to you to keep you from playing as wel

[quote]You can't make a similar chart for the XP upgrade and come to any meaningful conclusion. XP isn't received in a steady trickle. The XP upgrade is reactive - it applies only in relation to the experience you are receiving through your actions in play. In that sense, it's the only upgrade that directly corresponds to how good you are as a player. [/quote] You could say the same for the gold upgrades. Having a pile of cash isn't going to do anything by itself. What rea

[quote]While yer at it, could you swap the locations of the lightside Cooldown and Goldmine flags on cataract? As it is, darkside can focus more strongly on the health flag, and then push to the easily captureable goldmine flag, but light cannot (They have to focus on the much weaker mana flag). This would even the maps up for the two sides.[/quote] Doesn't this cut both ways? It's easier for light to defend their own gold flag, because they'll be focused on the&nb

The overlay isn't a problem. It's just information. You can't justify keeping information from people who, if they had the information, wouldn't want to play with you. Its supply and demand. The results from the overlay show that (1) most PUG players don't want to face teammates who are highly ranked and have high familiarity with each other and (2) there aren't enough highly skilled teams that want/can face other. You ca

[quote]the real question here is wether the benefit of buying xp1 (& 2) is greater, smaller or equal to the benefit of buying extra items with the gold instead personally I go for items, xp might be better I don't know there's no real way to prove this using maths either, since you can't express the advantage of an extra item / level in numbers[/quote] True. I think, though, that equipment or consumables is always better than having a one level up

Some of the pro-xp upgrade comments here don't make sense. Look at the table again. Forget about whether or not the other side buys priest upgrades, etc. If you buy the first xp upgrade, you gain no level advantage through out the course of the game by virtue of having that upgrade. You will get levels faster than your opponents, but you will not be more than one level above them at any given time by virtue of the upgrade. If you

Like many, I lament the fact that cataract is played so often online. Here's the things I don't like about cataract relative to other maps: 1. It really favors characters that can hold a lane on their own. A match-up like UB/Torch/Reg vs. Sed/UB/Erebus is already a mismatch, but the mismatch is exacerbated in Cataract. In Cararact, if you have three characters that can hold a lane on their own, it gives you a huge advantage in terms of letting someon

Because I'm just a casual player. I've used voicechat and have been part of premades, but I got turned off for a few reasons. The first reason is that it seemed like, unless we were doing an inter-clan fight, we always fought low-skilled PUGs who didn't know any better and got stomped. That wasn't that fun. The second reason is personal: judging from the voices I heard on Vent, I am an older player in the Demigod community (

[quote]Its not that much of a change (22% still leads to ~1.4k heals if you health stack), but I'd guess slightly less pounce spammage, in favor of heal. Slightly. Mainly it'll affect item buy order, as ~1.5k to upgrade your monks 100% was sweet and could take precedence over certain other 1.5k items. Now it'll cost ~2k to upgrade to upgrade your monks 47%, which can wait until later. [/quote] It depends on how you look at it. HW's effect on Sedna's priest minions went from

[quote]the big deal is that its F#$%ing boring playing against doubles.[/quote] This is the real reason most people use the "no doubles" rule. They just think the game is more interesting when facing a diverse set of demigods. As for double UB and Reg, I don't think it's so much a balance concern, but the fact that spit UB and snipe/mine Reg are two of the most annoying demigods to fight. Note that I didn't say imbalanced or to

[quote who="Obscenitor" reply="13" id="2326544"]Then you didn't say this, but I'll consolidate my responses to everyone in one post. It was said that towers cost too much mana to level up... I find this thinking completely backwards. Power of the Tower rank IV drops the mana cost down to 200 mana, towers in the late game seem to be balanced around that.[/quote] Based on that close game we played a couple of nights ago, I tend to agree with you that late game towers (plus orb) can

[quote]Oh, but about #4: Why does nobody seem to realize that towers start off with splash? The lvl 1 tower damage upgrade adds 10% more splash. It doesn't mean that they didnt have splash in the first place.[/quote] Because the in-game description is ambiguous. "Buildings gain 10% damage and splash damage." I think many people read the 10% modifier as applying only to base damage, and that the mention of the splash damage is to indicate something new.

Minion builds were definitely underrated. And I see a lot more minion builds than before, which is great. Before breaking out the nerf bat, though, it's best to give the metagame some time to adjust. One of the reasons I started using minion builds was because I was facing lots of UBs and Sednas with high priests; I think minion builds are particularly effective against these two characters, both of which lack an AOE or a mass stun. I'

Jesus, these PUG vs. premade threads make my head ache. And they all seem to be iterations of the same arguments; it's like reading the empiricists vs. the rationalists debate the same things over and over again for hundreds of years. Here's the gist: 1. PUG players want to know in advance whether they're facing a premade team. This is a fair request. If you are a premade team (and I do not think most premades do this), there's no excuse

Thanks, Kryo, for the quick response. I just tried some tests again with /serverproxyonly as of 11:15 US EST (I'm in NYC). I'm still getting pings in the 600+ range, especially if connecting to people in Europe. Connections to the US are in the 400+ range. Connections to Aus are in the 200-400 range. All of this is unusual, since before a few days proxies seemed to be in the 150-300 range.

I'm having this problem as well. Just popped in the last couple of days. EDIT: Funny thing is, I just did a test- if I join a game in Australia, the proxy pings are reasonable (~250). I live in NYC, so I wonder if people are in the Northern hemisphere are being rerouted to Australian proxy servers right now.

This makes a lot of sense, and I agree- games played is probably the best filter. Although I cringe when I see people who have played 150 or so games but only won 10 of them.

There are some good ideas here. But the game is so well balanced that I'd rather not have any nerfs than possible nerfs which have the risk of going too far. By well balanced, I do not mean "perfectly balanced" vis a vis the different demigods. If you try and make each demigod roughly equal to each other on a power/functionality basis, I think the risk of failing is not worth the small gain you'd get. Right now, there are imbalances, but they are minor compared to th

[quote who="Obscenitor" reply="9" id="2309727"] The reason why you never heard about premades in starcraft was because everyone could see everyone's record without tasking out and risking crashing. No one gave a shit about premades because if one team was 189-5, 237-5, and 142-1 and were fighting teams that were say 4-13, 39-32, and 9-15 they'd be laughed out of the game like a bad fucking joke. Oh wait, those weren't just made up numbers, t

Swift Anklet is a nice favor item, for sure. But more important than speed is efficient movement. Beginners move inefficiently; they constantly over-extend or run too far back when retreating. Swift Anklet helps them compensate for this inefficiency, which is why I would recommend Swift Anklet to any beginner. As you get better in the game, though, you learn to move more intelligently, and you realize you don't need

[quote who="Zechnophobe" reply="14" id="2294208"] I actually noticed recently, that when I play games with 'no premade' in the title (I do this when I host by myself) that almost everyone who joins has a losing record (more losses than wins). It seems that the dichotomy between premade teams and random pugs is just that great. I'd be really curious to see what % of the time the host wins the game. I bet it is an excruciatingly high amount. [/quote] Int

Guys, why are you attacking the poster? It's a reasonable request, even if in the end it is not a good idea. I think what you guys are saying can be civilly put as follows: "Sorry, I know it's frustrating to play a premade as a PUG, but it's not feasible right now because lack of team automatching makes premades vs. premades hard to arrange." Not "quit bitching and get some friends, noob". Way to build a gaming community. LOL. It is

[quote who="Obscenitor" reply="5" id="2287055"] I said something to the effect of "before we go are you two on my team good, because these guys are a premade," and immediately one guy on my team said he was okay, another said he was new, and the premade denied being a premade. At that point I called them liars and said that they had won the last eight games in a row with the same team. They called me a loser for being lame enough to look up their game history, and most