Skye

Sorry, I got confused. I meant pandas. Let your aaaaarms enfold uuuuus~

Can't we talk about space penguins again? I miss the part where we talked about space penguins.

I really love how that must sound to people who don't play TF2.

Not sure if my math is good, but the bonus lifesteal from Vlad's is virtually the same as the amount you would gain from having more damage to hit with your Vampiric Aura. Again, math might be off and I think Vlad's might offer a liiittle more lifesteal, but I prefer just straight-out damage. It's funny to get if you plan to get Satanic as well, though.

^ Also: Turns out that was a lie. It was a game where I went Beyond Godlike as LEORIC. Didn't manage to get full BALLIN' OUT OF CONTROL (only managed the aegis and rapier, the game didn't last long enough for the refresher to come next) but man that was fun. People really underestimate Vampiric Aura in the early game.

I'm not sure how to go about something like this, and I'm certainly not rewriting my entire PC just to test it. I suppose if I can pick up a cheap laptop, it'd be nice to run on that.

I had my first Ranked Matchmaking game. Well, I had my first of the ten 'calibration' games needed, but still Ranked Matchmaking. With Captain's Mode and the stigma one would attach with DOTA and MMR and such, I was pretty frightened. Turns out I had one of my best games ever. Mostly because my whole team spoke English, our captain was clever and friendly, and the enemy team wasn't drafted quite as well. I call it a lot of luck in my matchmaking, but yeah, thought that was worth mentioning in case anyone is worried about solo ranked. Of course, now I bet it's my second ranked game that has the swearing Russians and people firstpicking Ursa.

Jesus Christ, there's Christmas sales and then there's Christmas sales. Also um I may have bought you know that arcana for legion commander i couldnt control myself

I can choose to just not do what Smogon tells me, right? Cause if someone says "tier" to me one more time, I'm going to strangle them with a link cable.

http://www.dota2.com/frostivus2013/day2/

Well, I wouldn't know anything about that... seriously though that is a bizarre coincidence And while there's a lot of big words like 'discrepancies' and 'aggregate' getting through around in that blog post, which are far too large for my tiny not-liking-maths-brain, it sounds like they've put a lot of thought into it. If a Ranked Matchmaking system can't be perfect, then it sounds like they've got as close as one can realistically hope for. Of course, when it goes live, I imagine they'll learn more about how to tweak it when there's hundreds of people using it. I'm pretty excited until I do awful and drop down to Silver and never mention it to anyone ever again.

I was just thinking of selling all of mine myself. Weeeeeird.

Thank ya kindly, Sir Wulff. That settled an argument with a friend for me, and was a pretty interesting read. I didn't even remember that HoN had one. o:

To be fair, I actually wanted to pick one of these up as a nice old-time-console for the living room. As I saw with one of my coursemates, if you have a SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, NES and all the controllers and games everywhere, things get hard to organize and you trip over cables all the time and it's a royal pain in the ass. The Ouya fits everything into a single box with no hassle. The price is about the same as getting the consoles/peripherals/games individually, or maybe even less, too. However, with the Steam Machines and their modifiable OS on the horizon, I'm holding off for one of those instead - I imagine it won't take long for someone to make emulators for them. I still might get an Ouya if there's a sale or something, though. It fits a nice little niche.

Neither of those actually answered my question, but thanks, I guess?

I'm afraid to say it ain't. I rarely play Engineer because Ubercharge exists, and I don't own one of those fancy santa hats. I do remember being in a Don Newman video at one point, but it was a different name and I'd be hard pressed to go find it. Also yeah, comic. Loved it.

Is DOTA still going to get a ladder thing or is that not happening? I'm not pro enough to know if I even want something like that, except to say "yay i gold" and stuff. Just crossed my mind when a friend was talking about League the other day.

So the internet connection for my whole street went down as they were messing around with the fibre optic cables underneath it and whatnot, so I was completely marooned from the net for two days or so. I come back and the first thing someone asks me to do is watch the new Game Grumps where they play Wheel of Fortune. Best thing I've done all goddamn week. I'm still in fucking stitches, shit's hilarious.

I'm hoping to play more MvM tours and see if I strike lucky while the gold rush (tee hee hee see what i did there) is still going for these Australium weapons. I'm not exactly sure where this fits on the "smart business enterprising" scale, but I'm guessing that spending the money on tickets is not worth the time and effort one must give for just a chance at one of these things? Not sure how statistically likely it is I can get a second weapon, either. I think I defy the laws of natural selection if that happens or something. Then again, even underselling an Aussie weapon at £30 would mean I can afford about 50+ tickets, or about 13 more tours. Alternatively, I could just use the scrap metal that I don't need to use for hats anymore. Online economies are weird. I have enough trouble with real money. s:

Any mods one can recommend for TF2? I'm usually vanilla TF2 and I feel that I can improve this. If you're recommending a HUD, please suggest what's best about it - a lot of the "pro" ones I see are cursed with super minimalism where I can't tell what number means what and such. I've also propped my Australium Frontier Justice on the Steam Market. Hoping to sell it off before they inevitably drop in value, like the Botkillers. And now I am £44 richer. autumnsalefuckyeah

People have it up on the market for like $80 or something, but no actual sales yet, so I'm assuming that's overpricing. When the first actual sale goes through for that or 60 or 10 or 1 cents, I'll take a look. As for now, I'm looking for a Golden Ambassador to swap it for. And of course, more MvM tickets, since I'm never content. :3

[spoiler2][/spoiler2] HOORAAAAAAAAAY I'm a terrible Engineer anyway!

I did it. I finally managed to beat the tour. This is the most valuable Vita-Saw Killstreak Kit in the world.

Why does Dragon Knight look like Chuck Norris now?

Golden Ambassador makes me moist. Also the new MvM missions are pretty fun and fairly challenging for the most part, and I've had a lot of joy in playing them. Weirdly though, while they're usually balanced, Wave 4 of Empire Escalation is fucking brutal. Every time I join a game for it, they're at Wave 4 and everyone dies immediately to the Major Crits. Even when I go Spy (despite four French people shouting at me) and kill all the giant Medics to soften them up, it leaves the whole rest of the wave to go, and it's crit heavys, snipers, crit demos, scouts upon scouts, giant scouts on top of that... I hope it gets patched a little, it just seems out of place, since the previous waves are a breeze in comparison. EDIT: Yeah, I've been attempting it for the past 4 hours, can't get past the wave. I'll wait for a while and see if it gets nerfed in an update.