Fish Meets Martyr

I'm trying to stick to a regular schedule of blogging on Tuesdays, but Char made a comment on my last post which I wanted to reply to, but I think it's going to make a really long reply. Plus, half of my reply was the topic of my next post anyway, so I might as well write it now. My blogging will probably die down as I attempt NaNo again this year (still undecided as to whether I'll try both NaNo and NaBloPoMo again. Will be difficult this year now that I'm working full time).

"...it takes a lot of will power to fight the heart that just wants what the heart wants. "-Char

I agree with her on that point, and I think there are friendships that can never be platonic, no matter how hard you try. I think I've written about this before, but I want to get it out now for therapeutic reasons.

It all started with the Korean Panda trainers. For some reason, they were causing the US WoW servers to be down, and so I was at a complete loss for something to do. This was during my more obsessive WoW days, where my evenings were usually clear for WoW, and it was what I did every day, other than the planned WoW maintenance Tuesdays. I can't remember exactly how he found me, but RH was also in the same boat, so we started talking. Even though we'd only just "met", conversation was pretty easy. The servers came back up, and we both went back to our respective grinds.

But we started chatting more and more frequently, and because his guild was a lot more progressed than mine, I learnt a lot about the raid dungeons that I had never seen before. I think one of the best indications that someone is interested in you is the fact that the two of you stay up late talking, even though it means that you'll both be so screwed up the next morning. It was worse for him, as he had a pilot lesson the next morning, and my chess lesson felt like one of the longest I'd ever been to, as I spent the entire time worried that he was going to crash and die. Thankfully, he didn't. One of the highlights of my day was being able to talk to him.

It was pretty obvious that we were into each other, but a part of me was telling myself it was a bad idea (for reasons of my own). Eventually, that part won out, and I ended up asking him not to contact me anymore. We didn't speak again for years.

Then, due to a bug, we ended up talking, and we'd talk again every now and again. I found out he was engaged, and was pretty sad for a while. Eventually, I ended up spilling the beans about why I severed all contact with him, and he called me an idiot and said stuff that just made me like him even more. So I think given the circumstances, I don't think we'd ever be able to be platonic friends.

However, all of this reminded me of what I thought was called the Martyr Syndrome (hence the title), but when I googlged it, that wasn't what I meant. So I'm going to call it Premature-Partner-Death Situation. Imagine you have just started dating someone. You are in the honeymoon phase, where everything is perfect. You barely ever fight, and when you do, you end up resolving it pretty quickly. You spend almost every moment together, and it's fun and enjoyable. You still stay up late each night talking to each other on the phone. Then suddenly, your partner is hit by a car on the way to work and dies.

You never found out that they secretly hide rubbish under the cushions in the couch because they were too lazy to get up and throw it away. You never found out that they have a weird habit of throwing away a block of butter after using a small amount of it. Or other assorted things that would piss you off. So in your memory, they were the perfect person.

Of course, that means whenever you meet someone new, they can never measure up to this perfect person that you've created in your memory. And because that person is dead, there is nothing to contest that memory. Obviously, it doesn't have to be something as drastic as dying. They could move away somewhere, or the relationship could end in a way that doesn't cause you to feel badly towards them. The point is that memory of a perfect person that cannot (or is unlikely to be) contested.

That doesn't mean that you are doomed forever. I think it is important to remember that the person you hold in such high esteem probably isn't as amazing as you remember. If you try hard enough, you could probably find a few thing that annoyed you, or would have if you hadn't been blinded by love. Though my mind knows that, my heart still stops to wonder every now and again what would have happened between me and RH. I don't think it's a bad thing, and I care about MrMan5.5 enough that it doesn't get in the way. I just know if we were to try to be good friends, it would be dangerous.

The Truth About Cats and Dogs

Once again, the topic of platonic relationships between a male and a female has resurfaced, and I'm glad to say that it doesn't involve me, so I can say whatever I want! Char wrote a blog post about it in the past, but it has since been deleted, and I can't remember what it said, so I'm going to start anew.

I find it so strange that even as adults, there seems to be this strange assumption that whenever one male and one female are doing something together, they are a couple. Gone are the kindergarten and primary school days where the girls played in one area, and the boys played in another. Now that the Internet allows pretty much anyone to talk to anyone else, it makes sense that males and females are getting to know each other better, and become closer friends.

But just because you are friends doesn't mean that you are romantically attracted to each other. As an example, I made many male friends through the chess club, but MrMan5 was the only one I was attracted to, so that's a hit rate of about 10% - pretty poor! So you should at least only assume people are a couple 10% of the time based on that...

Though I think what Char was questioning was whether a male and a female can be close friends, and just be friends. Off the top of my head, I can think of plenty of males who I am just friends with, and at least four who I feel like I am close friends with.

I think the first thing you should look at is circumstance. Are one or both of them in a happy(-ish) relationship? I've found that being in a relationship makes you less likely to be on the look-out for a partner (though I'm sure that doesn't speak for everyone, as I found out there are now things like discrete dating sites). Not wanting to be a home-wrecker is also a pretty good deterrent (most of the time....).

Another important factor is the nature of the relationship. Are they just members of the same sports team, or is it at the level of being each other's confidante? I think the latter is falling into dangerous territory. This may differ for other people, but to me, being able to confide in each other is the ultimate level of intimacy. All of the people I have been attracted to are people that I have felt like I could talk to. And of the people I enjoy discussing things with now, I think it was due to circumstance that nothing ever happened. There's a really funny story that I would like to tell here, but I'm afraid it might cause a problem with someone I consider a good friend, so you can just imagine I told it and laugh.

This is probably going to sound a bit self-helpy, but I think that people are breaking down the traditional gender barriers, and trying to get to know the other side a bit more. The downside to this is that I think the dating game is getting a bit more blurred. Asking someone out to coffee doesn't necessarily carry the same, "THIS IS A DATE!" banner on it anymore. So for people who are a bit more shy, it requires being a bit more specific when asking someone out, lest you end up agonising over whether your "date" was actually a date, followed by the awkwardness of trying to find out whether the other person thought it was a date or not. Someone at work asked me to join him for coffee, then he asked me to join him for drinks. I was getting suspicious and about to pull out the whole, "I have a boyfriend thing" when Person explained to me that this guy spends a lot of time promoting a club, so he is always trying to convince people to go there with him. Person thinks he might have a share in it or something. Could have been really embarrassing.

I think it's entirely possible for a male and a female to be in a platonic relationship, and I encourage it. It is so hard to find people that you get along well with, and I think it's stupid to not consider someone because of their gender. But I guess if one person is already in a relationship, it depends on the level of trust between them and their partner. It might not be worth it if you have to deal with the increased paranoia from your partner ("Why were you 10 minutes late?!" "We got stuck in traffic." "Suuuuuuuure you did." *no sex for you*).

Diversification

gwon made a comment on my post Fifteen Minute Cast Time where he said:

Something else to think about: you actually have an advantage because they are restricting themselves to not having girls on their team, while your team can actually have players based on skill and not gender.

I don't think they specifically chose not to have a girl, it probably never came up. I know Alex had a girl in his DotA clan for a while, but some of the stuff I heard gave me the impression that she was more interested in socalising than playing, and I think eventually she dropped out. So it probably gives a bad impression for any future females who want to join, as people tend to try and work out what went wrong and blame it on whatever difference they can perceive.

I spent an hour in a workshop at work where people were trying to discuss the problem of the lack of females in technology. I actually found it a bit boring, because it mostly involved women talking about how they can't work as much as they would like because they have kids. While there may be a gender agenda when it comes to corporate life, I don't think it applies so much to gaming. I definitely don't recruit people based on gender (though my requirements are a bit more strict, I only like to invite people who I know in real life, but I don't hold anyone else to that same requirement, so they are free to invite whoever they want).

There was a girl that Julian and Char wanted to invite to the clan, but they left the decision up to me. Through random chance, we ended up playing in a game against her, our group of friends against her group of friends, and we won. I made the excuse that I didn't want to invite her because she wasn't very good, but I think I just didn't want a stranger in our clan. But maybe I should have invited her, so that we could train her up. I've invited people who aren't great into the clan (*cough, cough*), so it's not really fair to leave her out for that reason.

Anyway, back to gwon's comment. One of the arguments they always bring up when talking about the whole gender diversity thing is that when you bring together a bunch of people from diverse backgrounds it makes it easier to solve new problems, because you can draw from a wide range of knowledge. I think for things like gaming and sports, the opposite is true. When you are out there playing, you want to act like a well-oiled machine, you don't want someone rocking the boat. When our clan fields a team of five, we (mostly) listen to each other, and we've played together enough now to have a rough idea of each other's play style. We are not identical robots, but we are also not so different that we end up clashing in each game and not being able to function.

I think that in cases like these, diversity can be a problem, because you just end up butting heads too often to be able to function properly. But with computers being the great equaliser, I think people should be ranked based on their skill and experience.

As I discussed last time, there are so many variations in a game that it's difficult to create accurate models. So now when I say something like "1700 level Tundra", I'm not taking into account match-ups against specific teams, what I mean is that on average, in a 1700 level game, you will not play badly as Tundra (I know that is also subjective, but the gist of it is you don't die too often, you perform the role you want to perform (keyword "want": dps, initiator, support)).

Given a limited amount of time, you will acquire a certain amount of experience (represented by the area under the graph). How much experience you gain depends on your level of skill, and the level of skill that you play at. E.g. someone who has played a lot of RTS games in the past and starts to play HoN may pick up game concepts a lot faster than someone who doesn't have that background, so they will gain a lot of experience at the start playing against noobs, but after they start to play against more experienced players, their learning will slow down because there are so many little nuances to learn at this point that are game-specific and their RTS background doesn't really help.

So you have jack-of-all trades players, who have played a wide variety of heroes, and while they may have a few favourites, they tend to be fairly average at most heroes. They are very good with team cohesion, as they are able to take up whatever role is missing from the current line-up.

Then there are the specialist players, who tend to play the same few heroes over and over again, and are quite good at those heroes, but pretty poor at all the others. What the dotted line is supposed to indicate is that when you hit a certain level of skill, your overall game experience can make up for your lack of experience with that specific hero. E.g. you are an 1900 level player, and so your map awareness is high, your instincts are refined, and your knowledge of game mechanics is good. Even though you may not have played Myrmidon before, you don't die very often, you are aware enough to be in team fights, and you do your job. Basically, you are helping by not being a hindrance.

Of course, you are never stuck as one type or the other, it's a bit like WoW, you can chuck all of your talent points into a specific area (PvP spec vs PvE spec, for example), or you can try to go some sort of hybrid, where you may not be as good in that area as someone who has devoted all their time to that area, but you can still do what needs to be done. Unlike talent specs, it just takes a lot of time to change over.

Since my headphones have been almost broken, I haven't been able to play HoN with everyone else over Mumble, and it feels like I've lost a limb. I don't tend to talk very much, but being able to listen to what people want to do, or just what they are thinking really helps me work out what to do next. I was reminded of D2: The Mighty Ducks (spoiler incoming, if you haven't seen the movie), after their first game against Iceland:

Julie: Coach Stansson and his team knew everything about us.
Luis: Yeah, and you've just been driving around in convertibles talking with all those sponsor fools.
Fulton: And eating ice cream with the Iceland lady.

I guess I really don't know the people that I play with very well. I should really spend more time getting to know everyone's preferred styles, as I think it would make me a better support player. And I guess in the future, when I am deciding whether or not to recruit people, I should base that decision on how well they will fit in with the people who are currently there.

Katarno, the Police Mage

Unrelated to today's topic, Yish linked this blog Blackboards in Porn (SFW) which I found pretty funny (but I found it a bit disturbing that two girls in those photos have the same skirt that Charmeleon suggested I buy. Is that red, plaid skirt the stock standard for porn schoolgirls?).

I was looking through screenshots for my photobook and came across the comic I drew for Katarno's police graduation ceremony (sorry for the quality, it was taken with my phone, and each panel was one photo as Kat would be viewing it on his iPhone. Also, all the jokes in the comic are WoW(WotLK) jokes).

I find it funny that bad guys in my comics always have eyepatches, because my lack of drawing skill makes that pretty much the only distinguishing characteristic in people (that and ponytails, which I usually reserve for when I draw myself). I also found it strange that in some of the pictures, Kat doesn't have a face, I don't really know the reason for that.

In the drawing for Kat creating the portal, that was my attempt to draw the undead male casting animation. Kat did it once during a Tuesday dinner, and he looked so ridiculous it stuck in my mind. I also know evocation doesn't create ammo (especially not ammo for others), but I figured that was the real-life equivalent of reloading. Before you argue that it should have been "Improved Counterspell", Kat is arcane, so it probably is. But even if it wasn't, I imagine his wife talking that much is a channeled spell called Mesmerize (somewhat similar to the succubus' Seduction), it has a 4 hour channel time, and no mana cost. If you are under the effect, and you break the channel, you die instantly (anyone else breaking it is OK, but she will immediately attempt to cast it on whoever tries to break it, unless she is crowd controlled).

The policeman that looks like he's getting ready to be anal raped is supposed to be someone crouching behind a box (seriously, are there stick figure drawing classes I can take?!). If you are wondering why Kat looks so happy even though he lost his puppy, it's because he's a really cheerful guy.

Cognitive Model of HoN

Months and months ago, Julian and I were stuck in yet another baddies game of HoN and he wanted the team to do one thing, but half the team disagreed. He asked in frustration why they wouldn't listen. Putting aside the typical explanation of them being stupid/noob, I thought I'd try using cognitive models of learning to explain the answer.

I don't think all HoN players are stupid, and there have been times where someone has asked me to do something and I thought it was the dumbest idea ever, but now I've learned how good it really is. I've probably played close to 800 games of  HoN/DotA where I did not use wards of sight, and yelled at anyone who even thought about suggesting I buy some. Now it's usually one of the very first items I buy, and counter-warding is one of my favourite parts of the game.

Rewind to another tangent, I remember a time when AG was explaining to me how chess algorithms work. I don't know if this is still true, as I've never looked into writing chess AI, but at the time, it seemed like the most logical way to program a chess computer. The computer will look at the legal moves available (using heuristics to trim down the list (e.g. not playing h3 on the first move, as this is typically considered wasteful (although AG also told me there are these weird chess movements that come and go where all of a sudden, people seem to like to play moves like that))). Then it will use depth-first search to try to find the best possible move out of all the legal moves, "switching sides" and calculating the same for the opponent. I think I read somewhere that it usually did about 7 moves ahead. It determines the "best" move by adding up the values of the pieces it has, adding a few points for certain things like square control, active pieces, etc, and comparing that to the calculated value for the opponent at that point in time. Then it works out the best trade-off. If there are two equally good choices, it chooses at random.

It "learns" but playing lots of games, and when it wins, it "strengthens" the path for that series of moves, and when it loses, it "weakens" the path for that series of moves. The next time it comes to a crossroads, it will end up choose the stronger path.

Considering a computer has insane processing power, it can handle quite a lot of calculations. Plus, computers don't necessarily "forget" to take things into account. Humans, on the other hand, are quite fallible. I wanted to explain all of this because I wanted to contrast that to how I think humans develop "HoN-sense" (for some reason, I read that as rhyming with "nonsense").

When something good happens, you tend to want to replicate things so that it might happen again, and when something bad happens, you tend to avoid similar situations in case it does happen again. This is how things like superstitions develop. What I've typically found with HoN players (and which I am also guilty of) is that when they win, it's because they did well, and when they lose, it's because their team did poorly. So if you combine the two, you get players who remember the awesome things they did that caused the win, and banlist the baddies who made them lose.

Imagine that your HoN experience was quite limited, and of the few times you did the above strategy, you ended up winning. You play a few more games, and your cognitive map starts to look like this:

You've played and won with Pyromancer the most, so that is the strongest path at the moment. But you've experimented with a few other heroes and strategies, some going well, others not so well. I should point out that unlike a computer, we are unlikely to have calculated every possible path. So in this case, the lines represent past experiences. Whether the lines lead to win or lose indicates the outcome. The "strength" of the line in this case doesn't indicate the best path, but number of times that path has led to that outcome.

A bit more time, and you might start to see a pattern ("Every time I play Nymphora, go top, and buy boots and wards, I lose"). The only problem with HoN as opposed to a game like chess, is that there are so many other factors involved that it is quite difficult to consider every single one of them. Team balance, good lanes, runes, hero match-up, team skill, and neutral creep spawns are probably only a few. But because we tend not to overanalyse the situation (especially because this is supposed to be fun), you end up thinking Nymphora + top lane + boots/wards = LOSS. This is despite the fact that the map might look a bit more like this:

Every person goes through a different developmental journey, and everyone will come up with different cognitive maps with different lines. So when two people with opposing ideas come together, it's difficult to convince one person to try something they "know" to be a losing strategy. As far as they are concerned, it has never worked in the past, and is unlikely to work now. Even if it is a weak line leading to a losing path, they may feel adverse to that strategy as they believe there are other winning strategies available.

Which is why I think it's great to play with open-minded people who have never played before. They have no existing map, and so they end up learning your map, and you work really well together. ^_^

I think I'm skill-capped at the moment, and I don't think I will get better until I spend more time playing with better players, as I have the cognitive map of a 1500 player. It's something that I find difficult to do, but when I play with stronger opponents, I should spend more time trying to take on their maps, instead of feeling sad that I got completely crushed.

Stim Pack

Obviously, there is physical arousal (either of the sexual nature, "He/She is so hot I want to have sex now", or the adrenaline nature, "That tiger is going to eat me, I'd better run as fast as I can"), but what about intellectual arousal? Something that makes you want to think things, argue, debate, hypothesize.

The mentor I have at work that I mentioned earlier, I was thinking about the nature of our relationship, and though I consider him a mentor, he doesn't seem to give me all that much advice. I don't really know what mentors are meant to do, yet I somehow went from zero to three mentors in the space of about a year. I always thought they were meant to be sagely, and give advice (somewhat like those elderly people in old-school RPGs who you have to talk to in order to work out the next part of the quest). Though he does give me some advice, I feel that he is more of a person I can bounce ideas off, and discuss things with.

Every time we have a chat, I always walk away agitated, but in a good way. I suddenly want to do all those projects that have been put aside. I want to argue with everybody about everything and anything. So many hypothetical situations and money making schemes always start chugging away at the back of my mind. Is this what intellectual arousal is? Is this what it is like to have a muse?

Unfortunately, as I only ever see him at work, the effect usually wears off pretty quickly, as I have work to do (hooray!) and I'm not being paid to debate hypotheticals with people. I find that by the time I get home, all that energy has been sapped away, and the feeling is gone again.

When I tried to go to sleep tonight, I found myself lying in bed for a while. My train of thought eventually led me to think about my mentor, and I found that I was having an imaginary conversation with him in my head. I also found that I had an itch to do something, and I didn't really want to sleep anymore (which is why I'm awake now, even though I have to get up to go to work tomorrow). In the same way that you can picture an attractive person naked in your mind and it causes sexual arousal, I wonder if having these imaginary conversations is enough to provoke intellectual arousal.

It seems like a pretty dangerous thing though. I tried playing a game of HoN just then, even though I'm feeling so tired, and it felt a bit like watching the game with a strobe light. I'm farming peacefully, oh, now we're in a team fight, oh, I'm at the fountain now, oh, we're pushing a tower. Julian, Char and Twins carried the team though, so we won. :D

I thought about inviting him to something after work so that I could keep the buzz, but it feels weird. He invited me to something once, but it was a developer thing, so it was a bit work-related. Other than Tong's meet ups, I don't really have any developer things I could invite him to. Maybe I should frame a picture of him and put it on my desk. Though how would I explain that to MrMan5.5...?

Virtual Memory

There was a deal on Scoopon for a discounted photobook, where you send in a digital photobook, and they print and bind it into a hardcover book. I decided I wanted to get one for myself, but I don't really take the kind of photos that you would want to put in a coffee table photo book, so I figured it'd be a waste of money. Then I had the idea of putting in HoN screenshots, from memorable games. MrMan5.5 told me it was a waste of money, but I disagree.

Are memories from game events any less "valid" than memories of events from real life? I have quite a lot of fond memories from gaming. There was a UBRS run I went on with some guildmates, and one of the warlocks, Philip, wanted to play a joke on the party. He got us to summon him on the bridge, then he jumped off the bridge, hoping to shock everyone, then accept the summon and reappear on the bridge. Only he lagged a bit, and so he hit the ground and died before accepting the summon.

There was the naked boarhunting session with Meshu and Stringbeans, where the three of us (two mages and a priest) ran around Durotar killing level 8 boars with unarmed melee attacks, which took a loooooooong time as it was back before the removed the unarmed weapon skill.

There was the time Isoraji and I jumped down from the World Tree and I ran out of feathers on the way down, so I coudn't levitate myself anymore and died. It was a painful and expensive trip - I realised I should have just hearthstoned right away, but Iso convinced me to make it to the bottom, I thought the only way out was to keep corpse running and jumping further down the tree until I hit the ground. (Iso was a hunter, so I don't know how he expected to survive the fall, not to mention the fact that he used to play Alliance, so he must have known it was quite a long drop).

OK, so a lot of these are WoW memories rather than HoN memories, but there have been some pretty good moments in HoN as well. And most of the other multiplayer games I've played.

I just wonder if I go so far as to make a photobook someone is going to accuse me of being unable to tell fantasy from reality. I don't understand why people can recount the details of a tense sports game and it's fine, but if you start talking about a game in the same way, you have an addiction/need to get a life.

I've been addicted to a game, and there have been times where I think I've been pretty close to becoming addicted to other games, but I think I'm still able to tell fantasy from reality. So for that reason, I am making my own gaming memories coffee table photo book.