Sunday 16 December 2012

Discovery, Part 2

Since I've been doing so much reflection lately, I have finally cracked the bubble of Person's charm. I see now that he's pretty much the dick that so many people have told me that he is and I honestly don't know why I didn't see it before. Possibly more Luke Skywalker Syndrome which I still seem to suffer from.

His decision process seems to be:
That's fine for whatever he wants to do on a Friday night, but when it comes to doing the tasks that he is assigned it's, to quote GP, "Balls." He never takes the blame for anything, and has a CYA (Cover-Your-Ass) attitude towards most things. To make someone from his team happy, he changed our alcohol provider to their family friend, despite the fact that they are way more expensive. When we told him that we couldn't afford to go with that person for our BBQ, he refused to call them himself and let them know, so someone else had to do it. I bet he's telling alcohol guy that she's a stupid controlling bitch and that he did everything he could to change her mind, but she wouldn't listen. This is despite the fact that Person and the BBQ organiser are good friends. So from the alcohol guy's point of view, Person is the good guy. From the BBQ organiser's  point of view, it's a bit annoying having to call them to let them know, but she'll forgive him soon. So he remains the good guy. I finally see him for the manipulative bastard that he is.

Don't worry, this isn't going to turn into another post about how I'm the victim and everyone treats me so badly. I think this is the rise of a more ruthless Anna though. Rather than do favours for others in the hopes that they will do favours for me in return, I am going to try to move to a more tit-for-tat model. They asked if I am going to join the social committee next year, and I told them no. I took the coward's way out and said it's because my team doesn't approve (which is true, but not the reason I'm saying no). A part of me feels bad, because after the chair and vice-chair left (due to moving to another company), I think I took on most of the work. I don't want to see the committee fall apart, but out of the remaining members, I honestly have no idea who would make a good replacement chair.

On a side note, there were a few people who told me that I should be the chair next year, and I asked them why they didn't want to be chair and they said because they CBF doing that much work - they'd prefer to pick one easy task and coast by on that for the whole year. Gah, that annoyed me so much.

Another side note, there was one task I wanted. Only one. I wanted to order the pizzas for our end of month events because that way I could ensure that there would be a pizza without cheese that I could eat. However, the chair kept taking it away from me even though I kept trying so hard to do it, because she felt I was doing too much work. I know she meant well, but it was really soul crushing as it was the only thing I looked forward to as I made a bit of a game out of it - trying to remember as many people's favourite pizzas as I could, and making sure that the pizza they liked was in close proximity to where they were.

I'm trying not to rant, I really am! I think a product of the 7-ish years where I worked in a customer service role has embedded me with this desire to drop everything and help someone out as best as I can, and it feels nice when they thank me and remember me. One of the partly nice things that has come out of being in the social committee is that there are now people who know me who I don't even know. When I first started, there was probably a 1% chance that I'd bump into someone I knew in the lift. I'd say it's probably at around 70% now.

Discovery, Part 1

Yesterday the we (the social committee at work) ran our final event for the year. Now that it's over, I feel like a huge weight has been lifted from me. I've learnt a lot about myself this year, but other than that, I think being on the social committee has been overall pretty crappy.

If my life were an epic, I think I'd be categorised as a reluctant hero. I didn't want to become treasurer of the social committee, and only ran for the position because of peer pressure. My election speech was the cliched, "Don't vote for me". I won anyway, because the other two candidates dropped out of the race. Considering the previous treasurer was Person (and for those new to the blog, Person is the code name for someone), the financial records were pretty much non-existant. His excuse was that nobody looks at them anyway - which is probably true, at least until this year, when the person who became chair of the committee turned out to be an accountant.

I realised one of the members was basically keeping her own petty cash of the committee's money and was always really vague when I asked her what the money was being spent on. Things really weren't adding up, as according to the representatives who were handing money to her, we should have been making a profit, but according to her, we were pretty much breaking even. Since no records were being kept, I couldn't really accuse her of stealing, so I asked her to spend the rest of the cash on stock, and told her I'd be handling the stock acquisition from now on. Since then, we've been consistently earning over $500 each month. She dropped out of the social committee shortly after.

There were a bunch of other things that I ended up doing throughout the year, and if I were to estimate the number of unpaid hours I've put into the social committee, it'd probably be around 100-200. Why would I do that to myself?

The other thing that I learnt about myself this year is that my leadership style is that of someone who leads by example. I try my best not to ask someone to do something that I wouldn't do myself (with the exception of people who do things that I can't, e.g. plumber), and so if I want to ask people to put in extra time to do a task, I would do that myself to show that I am willing to do it, too. I prefer this style because it's important to me that the people I am leading respect me, and that I am not being unfair. However, I've found this style is pretty ineffective unless you have a team of people who actually care about you. Otherwise, what really ends up happening is that people start to see you as the person who gets things done, and not even in a good way, you become the person they turn to when they don't have the time/can't be bothered doing their allocated task - because they know that you'll find a way to get it done. You become the person who, at an hour before an event is to start, gets pinged with 5 messages, "Anna, I'm sorry to do this to you at the last moment, but...."

Lately, I've been trying to observe other leaders at work, and I really haven't seen anyone who is really effective as a leader.

Boss A is super nice, but I can see that he is pretty lenient with his team. It works out well, because they are all fairly self-disciplined, wouldn't abuse his trust, and enjoy the autonomy. I just feel like if it were any other team, they'd be walking all over him. One of the things I've noticed about him is that he doesn't act like he's above his team. He enjoys spending time with the rest of his team outside of work, and they all joke around with each other and make fun of each other. I could see myself becoming this kind of boss, except I know it'd end up a repeat of the social committee mess.

Boss B is nice on the surface, but you really get the impression that he couldn't care less if you were hit by a train on the way to work - except for the fact that it'd be a minor annoyance to him because the project you're working on might be delayed by a week while they find someone to replace you. Everyone smiles when he's around, but the moment he's gone, the truth comes out - they hate him. Whenever something happens that makes him look bad, he won't hesitate to blame downwards. Whenever something happens that makes him look good, he won't hesitate to broadcast it upwards. People have actually quit because they can't stand working for him. He doesn't spend time with the team outside of work - and they prefer it that way. It's not always bad, because people like this tend to move on to bigger and better things, but once they've reached the upper limit of their ass-kissing, whichever team they get stuck with ends up in a living hell. This type of boss is a huge no for me.

Boss C is well-liked by his team. He knows things about them and they feel comfortable confiding in him. He gets things done, but he doesn't constantly monitor his underlings to make sure they're working as hard as possible. He's also well-liked outside of his area, and I get the impression that he is really altruistic. When he met me he went really out of his way to offer me advice and guidance - despite the fact that we barely knew each other. However, sometimes I wonder if he even has a life outside of work. He does his job well, but he doesn't seem to do anything else. Plus, he seems a little too good to be true and I wonder if there's a sinister side to him that I just haven't seen. He doesn't feel like he's part of the team though, there is definitely a barrier there.

Personally, I'd like to be somewhere between A and C. I don't see myself being a B at all, and I also can't justify spending hours of my life outside of work doing work which seems to be a requirement for C. I did it this year, and MrMan5.5 really suffered for it. I was constantly coming home grumpy or tired and usually wanting to play a game or two of DotA to relieve stress then collapse into bed. Our meals have been pretty poor as neither of us really has the time to cook, though MrMan5.5 at least tries, I'd given up hope this year. I definitely can't imagine doing that and trying to raise a baby at the same time.

Saturday 20 October 2012

Hard Mode Hard Support

Cousin Andrew has been organising inhouse Dota 2 games lately, and I think it has been really good for practice. To play against opponents that actually ward, buy dust/gem and carry teleport scrolls already makes a huge difference to the random matchmaking games that we usually play. And the fact that both teams are usually on some chat program means you are punished a lot more for any mistake you make.

Last night, we played a game against some of Cousin Simon's friends, and one of them was playing Pudge. I kept getting hooked over and over again, even when I knew where Pudge was. I think I don't really know the range of his hooks as well as I should.

The pro teams seem to label the players within a team using a 1-5 scale, where the player 1 has the highest priority on farm, down to play 5 who has the lowest priority. E.g. if player 2 and player 3 are in the same lane, player 3 should allow player 2 to get all of the last hits where possible. Player 5 is typically the "hard support", and as they are the lowest priority for farming, they tend to have almost no items by the end of the game. There was a comic I saw with Crystal Maiden who had a huge smile on her face because she finally saved up enough gold to buy a big item. She goes to the shop, and finally gets to buy.... boots. I think I play the 5 position better than I play the others, so I have been focusing on that.

In the matchmaking games we usually play, I end up getting a lot more farm than I should, because I usually figure, if the person I'm lanning with isn't able to last hit very well, I might as well take the money, otherwise nobody is getting it. This usually means I have better items than I normally would if I were to truly play the 5 position. This also means I've become really complacent as I normally get away with doing things that I probably wouldn't have been able to get away with if I had no items.

So I've decided to try playing hard mode hard support in matchmaking games (when I play a support hero). The basic idea is that you cannot buy any items that boost your health. So nothing with +strength or +health. I'm still  undecided about whether +armour and +magic resistance are allowed, but I'm just going to say they are for now and see how difficult the games are.

I played a couple of games today, and realised that this rules out a lot of the typical support items (Mekansm, Pipe of Insight, Drum of Endurance, etc.). Poor Olek had to get a pipe for the team because I had banned myself from doing so (even though I had already built the Hood of Defiance). So I've decided to split it into Not-So-Hard Mode Hard Support, where only items that give you more strength than any other stat (with the +health stat at a 19:1 ratio for "strength" and +mana at a 13:1 ratio for "intelligence"), and Hard Mode Hard Support, which is what I initially described.

Items banned in not-so-hard mode hard support
  • Gauntlets of Stength
  • Belt of Strength
  • Ogre Club (however, you can purchase this to make your Aghanim's Sceptre as long as it's the last component you need)
  • Bracer
  • Power Treads in Strength form
  • Urn of Shadows
  • Drum of Endurance
  • Skull Basher
  • Abyssal Blade
  • Vanguard
  • Black King Bar
  • Heart of Tarrasque
  • Sange (however, you can purchase this to make Sange and Yasha, as long as you never have any of the components of Sange in your inventory (stash is OK) except the recipe)
  • Heaven's Halberd
  • Satanic
  • Reaver
  • Vitality Booster (however, you can purcahse this as part of your Soul Booster or Rod of Atos as long as it's the last component)
Additional items banned in hard mode hard support
  • Iron Branch
  • Circlet
  • Ultimate Orb
  • Wraith  Band
  • Null Talisman
  • Magic Wand
  • Ghost Sceptre
  • Headdress (except as the last component of Pipe of Insight)
  • Buckler
  • Ring of Aquila
  • Mekansm
  • Necronomicon
  • Dagon
  • Rod of Atos
  • Aghanim's Sceptre
  • Scythe of Vyse
  • Ethereal Blade
  • Soul Booster
  • Manta Style
  • Bloodstone
  • Linken's Sphere
  • Sange and Yasha
  • Eye of Skadi
  • Point Booster
Additional items banned in masochistic hard mode hard support (no armour/magic resist)
  • Slippers of Agility
  • Band of Elvenskin
  • Blade of Alacrity
  • Ring of Protection
  • Chainmail
  • Helm of Iron Will
  • Platemail
  • Cloak
  • Power Treads in Agility form
  • Ring of Basilius
  • Tranquil Boots
  • Medallion of Courage
  • Vladmir's Offering
  • Veil of Discord
  • Armlet of Mordiggian
  • Butterfly
  • Hood of Defiance
  • Blade Mail
  • Shiva's Guard
  • Assault Cuirass
  • Helm of the Dominator
  • Yasha
  • Diffusal Blade
  • Eaglesong
Items allowed in super you must really hate your life hard mode support (i.e. Consumables, basic boots and bottle)
  • Clarity
  • Tango
  • Healing Salve
  • Smoke of Deceit
  • Town Portal Scroll
  • Dust of Appearance
  • Animal Courier
  • Flying Courier
  • Observer Ward
  • Sentry Ward
  • Bottle
  • Boots of Speed
I realise the whole thing is a bit contrived, as most hard supports will get a bracer or two to avoid being one-shot, but that's why this is hard mode. You need to position yourself so you avoid damage completely. So far I'm 1-1 for hard mode hard support, and I've found the biggest problem is that you really need to end the game quickly, or get a large enough advantage that the other team can't really go hunting for you. Once the game drags out, your lack of health means even the other supports can auto attack you to death pretty quickly.

It is pretty challenging, as you usually have to go back to heal a lot more often and play a lot safer meaning you are pretty underlevelled for most of the game. I think I'll try hard mode hard support when I'm not the only support on the team, and not-so-hard mode hard support if I am the only support. Baby steps.

Tuesday 2 October 2012

Would You

First of all, I want to state that this is a hypothetical situation.

We have a social committee at work, who organises a bunch of events, and which I am a part of. As with any group, there are people who contribute more effort, and there are people who contribute less. It is a voluntary thing, and we don't get paid for it - and it also takes up time at work (and lately, I've been staying back late to make up for the time I spend on social committee things). It wouldn't be so bad that some people are not contributing much except for two things: 1. Some people are assigned tasks, and rather than let someone know if they're too busy to do them, they just leave them unfinished until it's too late. 2. At the end of the year, everyone on the committee gets a voucher, and it's the same amount regardless of the amount of work you actually did.

There is a guy on the committee who does not do tasks, and constantly complains he's busy. It's fine that he's busy, but then you have to wonder why he's on the committee if he never has time for anything. It's stressful for the people who have to take over his tasks at the last minute, because we usually find out too late that it hasn't been done - e.g. no ice has been ordered for the drinks tubs. Drinks arrive. Wait and wait and wait for the ice. Eventually decide that the drinks will not be cold in time, so a bunch of people have to find 20+ bags of ice. He shows up 2 hours later, "Sorry guys, I was too busy to order the ice."

It is at the point where we want to ask him to leave the committee (politely). Someone has volunteered to do it, but is really stressing out over it, because they hate confrontations. We all work in the same building, and who knows when our teams are going to need to work together. It just seems like it will create a heap of trouble. Why not just avoid assigning him any tasks and make sure he doesn't join next year? I was perfectly happy to do this, until he said he was unable to make a lunch time committee workshop as he had something really important on. I wasn't able to make it either, as I had something with my team, and I happened to see him leave the building. I needed cash from the ATM, so I was able to see that he just walked into a cafe, ordered a sandwich and a coffee, and sat there eating and drinking by himself. I had asked him earlier in the week, and he said to me that he was free on Thursday. For him to pull his "I'm so busy" routine again, only to be sitting and eating his lunch by himself annoyed me. Especially when everyone else has been giving up multiple lunch breaks to work on this.

One of the tasks he has been assigned is to take photos at some of our events. I've seen him with his camera taking photos, but strangely, I've never seen one of his photos. He has been asked to share these photos with everyone else, but claims he's too busy to upload them. You can tell that I've been spending too much time on Reddit when my first thought is that he might just be using this as an excuse to take creepy photos. But let's say, hypothetically, that I went in search for such photos, and I am fairly certain I found them.

In my head, I can see this playing out so easily. I just walk by his desk, and say his username in such a way that anyone else would think I'm just saying something to myself, but he will hear. Then, in a later conversation, I'll suggest that he should leave the committee. That way nobody has to stress over finding a way to ask him nicely, and he won't be causing trouble.

Then I realised, it's probably not a wise idea to cross this guy. In the words of Lucius Fox:
"Let me get this straight. You think that your client, one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands; and your plan, is to blackmail this person?"
So I ask you, would you do it?

Monday 24 September 2012

Fraternity

One thing I did get out of our failed tournament participation was that I found out that my brother is playing for a professional DotA 2 team. In fact, they were invited to The International - and if Valve is willing to give them an all-expenses paid trip to the US, they must be pretty damn good. I did a bit of Googling, and found an interview and a bunch of posts by other people. It's a bit weird, as I have known him his entire life, but there are people on the Internet that seem to know more about him than I do at the moment.

I have had people tell me that I should try talking to him again, but it has been so long since we last had a proper conversation, and I honestly don't remember why we stopped talking in the first place. We did a lot together as kids, and during primary school, I think I spent more time with his friends than with my own. It probably helped that he had a friend who had a giant collection of N64 games (he even had duplicates of some games, since his parents were divorced, and were both trying to spoil him). Or maybe I was just a loner. Then there is this big gap when we stopped talking to each other, and now it's just now. A part of me is wondering if the only reason I want to talk to him again is because he is (somewhat) famous. Though another part of me says that it doesn't matter why I want to talk to him again, it's good for the family if I do, and it'd make mum happy.

Sometimes I wonder if I only got into DotA 2 and chose poker as my second game because I wanted to keep some connection with him. I only saw him during one of my poker shifts, and whenever I wasn't dealing, I kept wandering over to his table to make sure that he was doing OK. I never told him though. After I found out about his DotA 2 team, I got a bit obsessed and tried to find out all I could about him. I tried to watch all of his TI2 games, but only managed to catch one of them live - the one where they got eliminated from the tournament.

I kinda feel a bit bad, I was mostly the good kid. I studied in high school, went to uni, didn't do drugs, tried to live up to the Asian parents' dream. He was the opposite once he hit high school. But the thing is, he was always better than me. He could practice something over and over, something I still cannot do. I think I've always preferred to live on the safe side - pick a degree that is likely to get me a job, and even though it will mean years of slaving away to make a decent amount of money, it's almost guaranteed. Whereas he seems to be fine with the idea of being a progamer and having a tiny chance of being successful, but once he makes it, then he'll have made it big.

We just seem to have such different personalities and backgrounds. If it weren't for the fact that we're related, I don't think we'd talk to each other at all. He drove me home a few days ago, and the entire car ride felt really awkward. I asked him a bit about The International, but seeing as his team didn't do so well, I didn't really want to ask too much. He asked me a bit about work, but after I briefly explained foreign exchange, the conversation died again.

He did mention that he wanted to take a year off uni to play DotA 2 exclusively, but he was worried about telling our parents, because he didn't think they'd understand. He also wanted to try and get a better Internet connection back at home, so that he could stream games and make a bit of money (though he said he'd need about 2000 viewers over 6 hours to make $150 - seems like a tough life to me).

The big sister in me wants to help him out, but I really don't know how. I mentioned that I watched him play, but when he asked why I was watching him, I lied and said I happened to be watching the stream of his teammate. Which I was, but the only reason I subscribed to that stream in the first place was to be able to watch him play. Am I bordering on stalker territory? Is it too late to make amends?

Monday 10 September 2012

Death of Democracy

August was a pretty busy month for me. Olek, Rangers, Cousin Andrew and Cousin Simon and I signed up for a DotA 2 tournament. We got completely smashed in all games except our last which we won! (But they lost a player halfway due to a power outage.)

While our losses had a lot to do with lack of teamwork, I think that what Olek said was correct: our team really lacked a leader - someone who would call all the shots. As the team captain, I guess that should have been my job. I've read a few posts that said the captain should never be the hard carry as they are too emotionally invested in the game. They need to be someone who can see the bigger picture. But they also need to be someone that the team respects. I think that it's a lot like management.

If you have a boss who you think has no clue (which can be common in IT), whenever they ask you to do something, there is always that feeling that you are better than they are, and so you either do what they say and mutter under your breath that they're incompetent, or you go behind their back and do what you want. If you think your boss is competent, then you are more likely to go with something they say, because you trust that there is a good reason behind it.  On the other hand, a good boss should be able to tell their underlings what to do, but also give them enough autonomy and trust that they will do the job correctly, i.e. don't micromanage.

So I think it's the captain's job to know their entire team's strengths and weaknesses so that they can give those kinds of commands, and have faith that people will listen. I know a lot of the failures in our games were due to the fact that we just had no team cohesion as we barely played any games together, but I have played many games with each of the different players individually, and so I think I should have known people's personalities better.

Following from Olek's point that we needed someone to call the shots, I think my personal management style is more democratic. I believe everyone should be able to have a say, and value everyone's input equally. That was a complete disaster. Our picks and bans were a complete mess, and it felt a bit like we just grabbed whichever heroes had some farfetched link with each other. I don't think we're at The International level (hahaha), but I think a lot of the points coL.Fluff says in the first part of his "mistakes" section apply to us also.

Oddly enough, I'm starting to see how bad it is to let everyone have a say. Even though we all had the same end goal (killing the throne), we all had a different idea on how to get there, and each person was pulling the team in a different direction. I think next time I'll pick people who play well together rather than people who play well in general. I also need to build up my own respectability so that people will actually listen to me.

Sunday 5 August 2012

Social Sim

I realised that my posts are pretty formulaic. They start with an anecdote of some sort (occasionally related to my life, but sometimes something I've read/heard). Then comes some discussion on a topic, usually related to the anecdote, but only just barely. Lastly, some question asking how I can improve myself based on what I've realised.

So, story time. When I played The Sims (the original), I played Michael Bechelor - mostly because I couldn't be bothered controlling multiple sims - and the AI in the original Sims was pretty poor, so if you left your sims unattended, their free will would usually lead to them doing stupid things. Pretty quickly, I maxed out all of his stats, he became really rich, and over a period of time, I managed to get him to the top level of each of the different career tracks. The only problem I had with him was his social meter. The fact that he lived alone meant that he was a sad social panda most of the time. And his long work hours meant that he barely had any time for socialising (especially when he was on the graveyard shift for various careers), but in order to climb the political ladder, I dosed him up on coffee and forced him to have social interactions until the wee hours of the morning.

When I got around to playing Bob and Betty Newbie, I noticed that keeping the social meter up wasn't nearly as hard. I think the biggest contributor was the fact that there were two people in the house. They could interact with each other to boost each other's social meter, and my sim didn't have to call in sick in order to invite people over at a reasonable hour (unsurprisingly, if you called a sim at 3AM, they get really angry at you).

Now that I've been living with MrMan5.5 for a while, I find that my desire to see my other friends has dropped pretty low. I think like in The Sims, my social "happiness" is fulfilled just by talking to MrMan5.5 and I guess I don't really feel the need to meet up with other people very often. Plus, my team at work is pretty cool, and I get some of that social energy out of talking to them, too.

Because of this, I feel like I've becoming more of a Socially Awkward Penguin than normal. I bumped into Olek at the supermarket recently, and I just couldn't think of what to do. Was I meant to walk around with him, shopping and chatting, even though I had already picked up all the things I wanted to buy? And even though DotA2 is pretty much on my mind all the time now that we've signed up for another tournament, talking about the game in the supermarket seemed really strange to me. It's weird, because I feel like I'm pretty close to Olek, but I couldn't think of anything that I wanted to say to him. So I did the SAP thing and disappeared with my shopping.

I feel like I'd be perfectly OK if I saw one of my friends once a month (i.e. every month I met up with one person other than MrMan5.5). I know that it's a really bad thing, because friendships are like plants. If you don't care for them, they wither and die (oh, speaking of withering and dying, I should really give Michael some feedback on his monsters). But I also feel like this is one of those other big transitions. Like when you first start high school, you catch up with your primary school friends regularly (if you didn't go to the same high school as most of your primary school friends, like I did), but then that drops off. Then you start uni, and eventually stop seeing your high school friends as often. Now that I've permanently joined a team, I feel like I have to spend time getting to know them, and between that, MrMan5.5, ice skating, Coursera, and the DotA2 comp, I feel pretty drained of energy. I wonder if seeing uni friends will also start to drop off.

Although, a lot of the other ex-grads seem to catch up with their uni friends quite often, so maybe it's just me? Even Person still goes to SEE events sometimes, along with the hundreds of other social events he gets invited to, and he's doing a Masters at the same time, so it's not like he has plenty of spare time.

Following from my last post, I managed to do four 30 minute exercise sessions this week, so the penalty fund is still at $20. Julian said that as long as the Salvos continue to help people, then it shouldn't matter that they don't support gay people. Joe came up with a good counterargument for giving the money to charity, as I would feel "good" about it, and could use that to justify not exercising! So maybe the Salvos is the best solution, as I don't think I'd feel good about giving to them, but they would probably still do some good with my money. Joe's other suggestions included hosting a board games night, or buying gifts for friends/family - just anything that puts the money out of my hands and won't lead to it coming back to me in the long run.

Monday 30 July 2012

Negative Reinforcement

I can't remember how long ago it was that GP told me to read the 4 Hour Body book, but I finally started reading it today, and it sounds pretty interesting. One of them was to do just 30 minutes of exercise 4 times a week. Seeing as unfortunate scheduling leaves my skating classes on both Saturday and Sunday (as opposed to both on the same day as previous terms), I'll get at least 30 minutes on both days, which means I only need to do 30 minutes twice during the week.

I think I could stick to some sort of weight loss program if I really tried - I mean, I'm the kind of person who can grind stupid achievements that nobody really cares about. The biggest problem for me is motivation. If I died tomorrow, the fact that I didn't manage to lose weight would probably be really low on my list of regrets. So it tends to drop pretty far down on my list of priorities. This is one of the things the book tries to work on. The author says that "The decent method you follow is better than the perfect method you quit."

MrMan5.5 has been trying to get me to stop eating KFC for so long. I think it was last August or September that I last had it, and the main motivator for me is the fact that the last time we went ice skating, Sharon commented on how the fat figure skater looked so out of place on the ice compared to all the other really thin girls. I definitely feel that way in my classes. Technique-wise, I was probably the best in my class last term, but I still felt like I was the worst because I felt like a lumpy. So that's what I'm reminded of every time I feel a craving. Plus, Grad Daniel and his gym-frequenting-marathon-running lifestyle makes me feel bad whenever I bring eat fast food in the office. Although, Grad Daniel is gone now, so he is no longer a motivating factor. In fact, Intern Daniel is a bad influence, as we are always talking about eating challenges and I am pretty sure he is going to talk me into another Pounder Challenge soon.

Anyway, this suggestion from the book is basically to use some negative reinforcement. If I don't manage to do four 30-minute exercises each week, then I will face a punishment. I haven't entirely settled on the punishment yet, but I've decided that for each week that I miss, I'm going to put $20 into a penalty fund (as I am rather attached to my money). If I miss multiple weeks in a row, then the amount doubles (so if I miss 3 weeks in a row, I'll have to put $140 into the penalty fund - $20 for week 1, $40 for week 2 and $80 for week 3). I think I shall trial this for a year - so until the 21st of July, 2013

I haven't decided what I'll do with the penalty fund yet. At first I thought maybe I'd use the money to take someone out for dinner (selected randomly somehow). But then I thought that might end up being a positive thing, as I'd be willing to give up exercise for a week and just take someone out to dinner.

My next thought was to donate it to the Salvation Army. I picked them because I am opposed to their views on homosexuality. That's a pretty good motivation to exercise! But just the thought of having to donate to them makes me sick, and the fact that I started this two weeks ago and I've already missed a week means I will have to donate. I guess I'll just put it aside for now, and work out what to do with it later.

Current penalty fund: $20.

Saturday 23 June 2012

In the Reeds

I've been feeling bored lately, mostly because I'm starting to get pains in my wrist - I think caused by too much Diablo 3. I've decided to take it easy on my wrists for a bit in order to be ready for the Company of Heroes game with A1 and A2 over the weekend. I signed up for Amazon's MTurk today - which is where people can submit HITs (Human  Intelligence Task) and people are paid to do them. Most of it is pretty boring stuff, clicking on stuff, and you only get paid around $0.10 per task. Plus, since I don't live in the US, I can only get paid in Amazon gift certificates.

I mostly figured, I spend so much time clicking stuff in games for free (or in some cases, I pay to click in those games), why not make it something profitable. The tasks themselves aren't that taxing, the only boring part is filtering through all the crap tasks, and tasks that don't seem all that ethical (one task was to block a certain result in the Google search results, which I'm guessing is a competitor of that company). I think I made about $1.30 today (assuming the tasks I did get approved). Though I know I'd make more money if I was doing work at work and claiming overtime for it, so it doesn't feel that amazing.

One of them was kinda fun. Someone had a list of company executives, and you had to find out whether they still worked for the company, and held the title they had listed. Albert and Grad Daniel keep calling me a stalker because I can find information about people. I don't really consider myself stalker-like anymore, as I don't spend time looking up information about someone or something unless someone else is after the information (the exception being Grad Daniel, before he started, because I wanted to make him feel welcome, so I read his blog). I don't think my Internet searching skills are all that amazing, though I'd like to get to Tom Gale's level some day. I just think that in comparison to the less technical minded people I know at work, I am more adept at navigating the intranet and looking for things with Google. Plus, my first rotation was in a support team, and I had to learn how to find/contact other people in order to resolve issues. 

Add to that what Albert calls my "freakish memory", which is not really amazing memory, but the fact that I don't see a lot of people outside my team very often, so I tend to remember the few things I learn about the people I meet. I'm starting to get the feeling that he is a bit scared of me. I also say things to him that I now realise are quite mean, even though my intention was just playful teasing.

So inspired by Darren's One Year to A Better Me challenge, I've decided to set a little challenge of my own. I'm trying to go 30 days without saying anything mean to anyone. I've already failed twice (yersterday and today - once with Intern Daniel, once with Grad Daniel, I'm so weak during lunch. T_T). So I'll start the countdown again tomorrow. Wish me luck!




Tuesday 12 June 2012

FX Appeal

Someone on Reddit asked if anyone who had made a post (with naked/revealing pics) on r/gonewild had lived to regret their decision, and this particular comment, and I_KeepsItReal's reply caught my interest.

(In case comments are deleted or the thread dies.)

Photobucket

I think it was a couple of weeks ago when I had a dream that I had had sex with my manager. I felt guilty at the time, but then I realised it was probably like in Scrubs when Turk dreamt about Elliot (NSFW). Only it won't go away. It's like a switch has been flipped, I barely noticed him before and things were really cool between us, like friends. But now when I see him, I can't help but think, "I dreamt about having sex with you." It's not that bad, since we are on different projects at the moment, so I barely talk to him at work except about graduate program related things.

Except when there was a team movie night last Thursday, and we went for a drink after the movie (I only tagged along because I felt bad for the guy who organised the movie night, as only the 3 of us went). The other guy chugged down two beers, then his wife called him and he had to leave. So it left the two of us. Even though I was slowly drinking my one drink, I could feel my mind getting slower and slower and I was saying things I probably wouldn't have said normally. I was almost about to tell him about the dream when I finished my drink and I think the rational part of my mind finally won control and told me it was time to go home.

Now that I'm thinking clearly, I can see no benefit in telling him - unless my ultimate goal is to make things so awkward that I get kicked out of my team and have to try and find another role for when the graduate program ends. Which I can assure you it is not. But that does not change the fact that some days, I can't even look at him in the eye without being worried that he can read my mind and know why I feel so embarrassed.

I_KeepsItReal says that masturbating is a healthy way to cope with an infatuation. But it just doesn't seem right to do it thinking of my boss. Partly because I would feel bad as I love MrMan5.5. I don't believe that we can only think of each other while masturbating, but the fact that it's someone I actually know and not a video of a stranger on the Internet just makes it seem more real, and ups the guilt-factor.

The other part is the concern that it might get worse. Dreams happen by accident (well, sub-conscious mind, etc., etc.) - it's not like I actively made myself dream about him. If I tried to do it on purpose, then I might go from thinking I dreamt about him when I see him to the constant reminder that I fantasised about him while pleasuring myself.

I'm slowly adding to my list of reasons I regret choosing this team. Since Person is so great at sucking the sexual energy out of everything, I'm almost certain this would never have happened when I was in his team. But I console myself with the thought that I have learnt far more in 4 months in FX than I learnt in 6 months in Person's team.

Saturday 9 June 2012

Hey, Listen!

I haven't mentioned Grad Daniel yet, but he's one of the new grads who is currently in my team. I kinda think of him as my protégé, because even though he's a grad, it feels like he's a grad like me, who doesn't care about brown-nosing. I think a lot of the time, we get each other through the work day, because we'll chat to each other over IM and keep each other awake. One of the things that he does a lot is eavesdrop on other people's conversations. We have an open plan office which means you can always hear other people talking.

When I was growing up, I was always taught that eavesdropping is rude. I did it anyway, but I tried to avoid doing it on purpose. After starting work, and with all the background chatter, I started to filter things out - firstly because I figured I should keep out of other people's business, but also because there are certain compliance things regarding knowing information, and I don't want to get someone into trouble by saying something I shouldn't - so the less I know, the better!

But it seems like eavesdropping is the norm in my current team. Mostly it's the good kind of eavesdropping, when Grad Daniel and I are trying to solve a particular problem, and one of the more experienced developers will overhear and say, "Why don't you try X?" But sometimes it's about personal things. I partly feel that if they are talking that loudly, then whatever they say is free game, but I still feel that if I were to chip in suddenly, it would be rude.

Grad Daniel keeps telling me to get better at eavesdropping so that I can keep up with what's going on in the rest of the team. Maybe I should just listen and not say anything unless I really think they will benefit from my addition?

Sunday 13 May 2012

Special FX

In happier news, I have pretty much been offered a job. I'll be doing development for interfaces to FX feeds, I think. My team is a bit split at the moment, so I don't really know where they'll place me. At the moment, I'm writing an automated testing tool that'll allow us to test SSIS packages, which I'm actually finding really fun.

As part of the graduate program, we are required to find a permanent role at the end of our last rotation. I think the graduate management team realised that if all of us start looking for roles at the same time, it would lead to 100+ people all competing for the same few roles, so they decided to let us roll off earlier if we managed to find a place. Since I'll be staying in my current rotation, they want to wait until the program ends before giving me my permanent role, because that way the graduate program will continue to "pay" for me, so I'll have to wait a few more months before I get a pay rise.

It's a bit stupid how they have organised the grad program. They merged some of the business and technology areas into one area, and hired grads under a "generalist" umbrella - meaning they didn't care what you studied at university, they'll take you and place you somewhere. However, since all the banks are currently going through a technology overhaul to get rid of ageing systems, a large amount of roles are in technology. Having talked to a lot of the grads during various grad catch-ups, I think I'm the only developer (and I wouldn't even consider myself one, if someone were to ask me. There's the one class, one method guy, but I don't count him). I know a couple of people who can test, and semi-enjoy it. I haven't met anyone who wants to do support. So basically a majority of the graduate program wants to be a business analyst, or project manager.

That would be fine, except for the fact that everyone is cutting costs, which means less projects, which means less BAs are required. So you have a bulk of the jobs being in dev, testing or support, and a bulk of the new hires wanting to be BAs. I'm just really curious about the entire hiring process for the graduate program. It's no secret that there is a shortage of dev/test/support staff.

I've been thinking a lot about someone's last blog post, where they said that they can code, but never seem to be able to get a job. They thought they were being talkative during an interview, but got feedback that they didn't talk very much. It also made me think of someone from the #se440 group who I think is a great coder, but is really quiet most of the time. The most animated I've seen him was when he was arguing with Yaksha about something, and even then, I think I generally talk more than he did then.

The current interview system for finding grads in this climate is stupid. One of the grads in my year was convinced he was going to roll off into a senior management role. Grad meetings with the leadership team were just a chance for me and the Arnie twins to play buzzword bingo during his brown-nosing. We nicknamed him "The Congressman", because he loves to ask stupid questions about U.S. politics to make it sound like he's intelligent. But if even I can tell that he's pulling stuff out of his ass, I'm amazed that everyone else can keep a straight face. Yet this is the type of person who gets hired.

Coffee Nick finds it funny that they tell each year of grad that they're tomorrow's leaders, and whenever they are introduced to past grads, it never occurs to them to wonder why that grad is still only a "lowly" senior support analyst. If only they would do the maths: for a company of thousands of people, there is only one CEO, and he might have a team under him of about ten people. That means to get into one of those positions, you need to wait for one of them to die/retire/quit. Not to mention the long line of people waiting to be promoted. It's like you're a distant, distant, distant, distant cousin of the royal family trying to make it to the throne. I wouldn't hold my breath.

They need to stop looking for tomorrow's leaders, and start looking for people who can actually accomplish something.

Thinking about it, Person got into the grad program because he's good with people. Paul and Tong got rejected because they're actually competent. Sumeet got in, but then again, he also got into Microsoft, so it's hard to say whether they only pick incompetent, sociable people. But I'm horrible with people, and a terrible developer. MrMan5.5 says I'm just not a technical person, and I agree. I definitely have no aspiration to be the next CEO of anything. I asked my manager what job he would have if he could have any job and not have to worry about things like how much he earns, or the hours, or opportunities for promotion, and without hesitation, he said he'd like to be one of those outdoors tour guides. I have no idea what I would do. I wonder why they picked me. I wonder what it means that I got rejected at first.

Unlike the blogger I mentioned above, I can't really do anything. If I were completely honest with myself, he could probably do my job at least five times as well, and yet I'm the one who goes into the office five days a week, and he isn't. Doesn't make much sense, does it?

Saturday 12 May 2012

End of the DotA Guide

I stopped writing the guides for a while because I was on a massive losing streak, and it is hard to convince yourself that you can give advice to others when you are losing game after game after game. Here is what I would have written guides on, so Google other guides on this topic if you even care.

Advanced techniques:
-Stacking and pulling neutrals (stack at x:52, pull at x:16 and x:45).
-Orbwalking
-Counterwarding
-Smoke of Deceit

Team balance and hero picking
-balance of supports/gankers/carries
-push teams
-jungling to add an extra support lane
-things to keep in mind:
--laning phase
--game phase balance (early-game vs late-game)
--number of disables
--balance of physical and magic damage
--number of invis heroes (on either team)
--opposing heroes
--play styles

Situational Items:
-auras:
--AC
--mek
--radiance
--Vlad's
--ring of bas
--Shiva's

-items:
--urn
--pipe
--linken's
--bkb
--magic stick
--refresher
--boots of travel
--dust
--orchid

I've decided to quit DotA2 - or at least stop playing for a while. My reasons for this are going to be long-winded, so I won't be upset if you decide to stop reading now and leave with the TL:DR reason of me being sick of always playing support, and realising that I really am not having fun anymore.

I remember a game of HoN a long time ago, it was with Teekay, Olek and someone else I don't remember, but may have been MrMan5.5 or Lume. It was all pick, and as soon as the hero selection screen came up, I hit random and got War Beast (Lycan). I can't remember who anyone else picked, but we had no support on our team, but I clearly had the hard carry hero. No courier (this was before the free courier), no wards, and the laning heroes had died quite a few times in the early game due to no missing calls, and the fact that no wards were up. The game was pretty much over before the 15 minute mark.

I got pretty angry, with an outburst that was mostly aimed at Teekay that went something along the lines of, "I play support for you every single game. I random a hard carry and you can't do the same for me in return?" This was mostly due to the fact that in a lot of games, Teekay would go Swiftblade (Jugg) and ask me to go Glacius (Crystal Maiden) for early first blood. Admittedly, I hadn't said anything before then, so how were they to know I felt that way? But I think 2 or 3 years have passed since that event, and nothing has changed, so what went wrong?

For one, I started falling into the support role more and more. Probably because my desire to win usually overruled my desire to play the hero that I wanted to play. Secondly, we started training for a tournament where it was important for each of us to become good at the roles we had chosen to play. Lastly, my success rate with carries was a lot lower than with support, so maybe I was just horrible at it.

With DotA2, and the absence of average game stats, I am looking at my own stats at the end of the game a lot more now. When I play carries, I have a decent gpm, even when we are losing. I have good map awareness, decent battle instincts, and am getting much better at last hitting. So why am I such a fail carry? I don't like to blame others when I don't do well, but a thought occurred to me - what if I never do well as a carry because I usually end up playing a support/carry hybrid? 1 set of wards costs 200g. Wards restock every 3 minutes, so that's 22 sets of wards over an average 60 minute game (assuming you buy them as soon as they're available). That's 4400g.

At work, I'm on what is basically the executive committee of the social committee. As over half the exec was away on leave, I volunteered to be in charge this week. (This is related to DotA2 in the end, not just a random topic jump.) A couple of the members came to me with a problem, that led me to take a look into the financials (as treasurer, that was my job anyway). I started to get a feeling that someone was stealing money, but since the last treasurer hadn't kept very good records (and somehow all these people who work at a bank were OK with this for some reason?!), I had no proof. I spent most of my lunch hour talking to people trying to see if I could find some proof, but failed. My suspect was being incredibly difficult to track down and not responding to any communication. So by the end of the day, I was really stressed out, and all I wanted to do was play a couple of games of DotA2 to relax, and then go to bed.

I end up joining a party with X, Y and Z, and we get SD. I was having enough trouble picking my own hero, and in a rare case for me, I didn't even care about team balance - I hadn't even looked at the other heroes my teammates said they had. Then I realised X was asking for suggestions on which hero to play, but I was way too tired to try and process that, so I left it for Y and Z to answer. I picked my hero and the game was about to start. But X still hadn't picked a hero, and was asking once again which hero to pick. I had no idea which heroes they said they had, and DotA2 only lets you see the last 5 lines of chat. I was about to ask what X's options were when the following thought process went through my head: after you tell X which hero to pick, they're going to ask you which lane to go to, and what items to buy (I really question whether anyone read my blog posts at all). I honestly could not be bothered with all that during that particular game, so I stayed silent thinking X would just pick a hero at random and do a Matti.

Instead, X raged at us for being really unhelpful, tried unsuccessfully to ask the other team (I discovered later that you can't talk to the other team at the hero selection screen) and then rage quit the game. I guess I should have known agreeing to play with X meant agreeing to answer those kinds of questions, but I think if I had tried to play without X, then they would have gotten angry at me anyway for declining the party invite without a good reason, and playing anyway. So it was a lose-lose situation.

Then there were the games yesterday. I tried to answer as many questions as I could to avoid a repeat of the previous game. In our second game, Y tells X to buy the courier, but X has no money left. T ends up buying the courier, and I say to X (who had Lich/Plague Rider) that next time it's better for Lich to buy the courier (I should have explained that it's because Lich is a strong laning hero due to his extinguish and nova spam, and so he doesn't really need regen items as much as other heroes, but I didn't). Then we got into an argument about whether it is worth buying the courier at the start of the game (X's argument was that it does not help you last hit better, or spend more time in the lane. I argued that it does help you spend more time in the lane because you can ship yourself items instead of walking back to the fountain to get them, but I guess since X was dying so much at the start of that game, it probably wasn't worth getting a courier for X, since dying gives you a free trip back to the fountain anyway! Not that you have any gold left to spend, but that didn't seem to be a factor).

X then said I was a bad friend, and if I wanted a courier, I should stop being a cheap ass and buy one myself. As I described above, this was starting to become a sore point for me. In previous games with X, either Y or I purchased the courier, and in a couple of games, I bought the courier, all the wards, and carried the game. Yet I am the cheap ass.

If I tell X what to do, I’m a bad friend. If I don’t tell X what to do, I’m unhelpful. It’s not worth breaking friendships over a game, so in the words of Joshua, the winning move is not to play.

Saturday 28 April 2012

Force Choke

A break from DotA related things today, as I realised there might be a bit of information overload. This is an O.5 post, bordering on R, so read at your peril! For my DotA players in training, try to focus on picking a role, and learning a few heroes who can perform that role.

Yesterday (4 days ago now, as I stopped writing mid-post) I learned that a penis is actually partly spongy, courtesy of Very Demotivational Posters and Wikipedia. It makes sense, as, if hentai is to be believed, there must be some way for guys to hide something that can grow to the size of an adult human's arm in teenage boy gym shorts. I remember watching something linked to me years ago where the premise was this guy was the "Chosen One" because his penis could grow to accommodate whatever girl was trying to please him. There was a club at the school that controlled the school, and members of the club could do whatever they wanted. The head of the club was this girl who had to give this new guy a blow job to be promoted to something else, but failed, because his penis was too big. So they're afraid he was the one spoken of in prophecies who would bring down the club with his huge dick, and so they send all of their members to try and get him to orgasm, but they all fail as he pleasures them too well and they fall over in exhaustion. I'm sure the plot was better than that, but I don't remember it that well.

One particular scene sticks in my head though, they're in a classroom when three of the girls try to seduce this guy. They grab him and throw him against a wall. One of the girls begins to suck his cock, and he starts to moan. But as she continues, she starts to struggle as he's getting bigger and bigger. Eventually, she starts choking, and she can't take it anymore, so she stops.

At first, I just passed it off as "those crazy Japanese, what will they think of next?" as nothing like that would ever happen in real life. I don't think I've ever seen a form-matching penis, but I have watched a lot more porn since then, and only now that I've started to think about it, it does happen quite a lot. Well, by a lot, I mean in the subset of porn that I enjoy watching the most - porn that focuses mainly on blowjobs (although it leaves me open to my nemesis: a2m). On a side note, after this picture Julian linked, I feel quite proud that I think I'm still what would be considered vanilla despite being spending as much time on the Internet as I do. On a side note of that side note, despite what I said about wanting to make people feel more comfortable about their fetishes, I think I am going to stop myself from ever asking someone what their fetish is. I was just thinking, that despite the fact that Graham and I share quite a lot on this topic, and do a lot of discussing, I don't want to know what his fetish is.

I mean, what if his fetish is having short, Asian girls come up to him saying that they're sick of being unsatisfied by Asian dicks, and they want him to show them what a real man is like, when he pulls out his gatling gun-sized penis and later they conquer China together. Now that I think about it, he seems to like collecting short, Asian, female friends, and what if during our entire friendship, he was just subconsciously planting the idea in our heads - and isn't the fact that I just thought of this proof of his scheme?! So now this is what I'll think of when I think of Graham, and not only that, if I ever see him with a short, Asian female, I'll wonder whether he genuinely wants them as a friend, or if he is just biding his time. This stuff can ruin friendships!

Back to the original topic, I've seen a few videos where you look at how big the guy is, and you think there is no way he could fit in her mouth, but she manages somehow. Only she only bobs down twice, and has to go back to licking again. Then she'll try again, and she might last a bit longer this time, but still not very long. Then later, the guy will push her head down, and you can tell she's struggling, because now she sounds like she's choking. I wonder if they have to sign waivers or something - occupational hazard: large, erect penises. It's also not like she can call out a safe word if she's in trouble or something, because, well, for one, it's rude to talk with your mouth full. It seems dangerous, there was one video I was watching where the girl seemed to be in tears, and I couldn't keep watching as I was starting to get worried it'd turn into a snuff film.

On the other hand, I have great respect for the girls who are able to follow through. I'm envious of the level of self-control they seem to have. Although RH assured me that unless I had just eaten a lot of food, deep throating will at worst cause dry-retching, if I feel even slightly like I'm going to throw up, I have to stop. I don't know how my mum expected me to become a doctor, as I have such a weak stomach. I actually started feeling queasy when Albert was talking about finding hairs in your food.

I wonder if I should add vomiting to my grad bio in my list of skills. My manager wants me to add all these skills that I really don't think I have, and after Albert's failed stint as a Java developer, I'm afraid of ending up somewhere where they think I'm able to do stuff that I can't.

Whoa, this post jumped around a lot. I guess that is what happens when you try to continue the train of thought from 4 days ago... Sorry everyone for the mess!

Tuesday 24 April 2012

Noob Level DotA: Phases of the Game – End Game and The Bigger Picture

Games will typically fall into three phases: early, middle and late. Transitions are one-way (i.e. a game that has changed from early game to mid game cannot transition back to early-game), and transitions are ordered. You start in early, move to mid and end with end game (although some games may not reach end game – particularly games with lots of pushing heroes).

END GAME
Starts: Once the hard carries stop farming and start joining team fights
Ends: At the end of the match

The last phase of the game, usually at this level of play, you should already be able to tell who is going to win at this stage - generally, whichever team has the highest level players, or the most farmed carry.

Team fights will be far more common during this phase of the game, as both teams will be trying to rax (kill the barracks), and that is a lot easier when the other team is dead.

Killing Roshan is also very popular during this phase, as a team may push all the way to the enemy base, but not be ready to push into base, so they go back and kill Roshan to get Aegis and effectively turn a 5v5 battle into a 6v5 battle.

I know I sound very negative when I say this, but usually, the outcome at this phase is a forgone conclusion, and it is very rare that a team that is losing will come back. However, if your team does have more hard carries, it may be worth holding out a little longer for them to farm some items, as when you are all level 25 with 6 item slots filled, the determining factor becomes who has the better carry heroes.

Turtling involves defending your base, and maybe pushing out to where your 2nd tier towers used to be. Defensive wards are really important, in particular the über-ward location outside your base.

As a general rule of thumb, if you lose one melee rax, you can still hold on. Losing two melee rax is pretty much the stage where you should give up, as it is very hard to leave your base while defending against two lanes of strong creeps. However, if you manage to take one of their melee rax, and they have taken two of yours, but one is the same lane in which you have raxed, then you still have a chance.

Middle lane is the easiest to push, as it is the shortest lane. The lane opposite to their jungle lane (i.e. top for Dire, bot for Radiant) is the next best to push, as it keeps their carry from being able to go back to the jungle easily, and also means if they are farming the neutral creeps, it will take them just that little bit longer to get to you. Plus, it's lane not covered by the über-ward.

THE BIGGER PICTURE
To sum up everything I've said, DotA really comes down to three things:
-gold
-EXP
-map control

That's really all there is to it. You want to help your team increase these three things, and you want to reduce those three things for your opponents.

The carry wants to farm as much gold so that they can buy items and carry. The gankers and support want EXP to make it easier to gank enemy heroes. Everyone wants to gank enemy heroes because it means they have less gold and EXP. You want map control so that your team can farm safely (gold) and you can gank enemy heroes (less gold/EXP for them). You don't want to die (less gold/EXP for you, more gold/EXP for them), but if you do die, you want it to be in exchange for something that will mean at least a net loss of gold/EXP/map control for them so that overall, you come out on top, or you break even - e.g. dying to take down a tower.

So to breakdown the roles again in a different way:

Support:
- buy the courier so your team spends less time going back to buy things (+EXP/gold)
- increase map control for your team by warding(+map control)
- babysit the carry so they can farm safely (gold)
- harass enemy players so they can't farm as well or have to go back to the fountain (-EXP for enemy)
- help the carry get kills (EXP + gold)
- counterward (-map control for enemy)

Initiator:
- initiate in team fights so carry can get kills safely (+gold/EXP)
- roam around the map helping to gank which makes the opponents fearful (-EXP/gold for enemy)

Ganker:
-kill enemy heroes (-EXP/gold for enemy)
- roam around the map helping to gank which makes the opponents fearful (-EXP/gold for enemy)

Carry:
- farm (+gold/EXP)
- farm (+gold/EXP)
- farm (+gold/EXP)
- kill enemy heroes (-EXP/gold for enemy)

Pusher:
- push towers (-map control for enemy, +gold for your team)

Tank:
- take hits so your carry doesn't die (passively +gold/EXP for your team)
- take the bulk of your damage so that your glass cannons don't  die (passively +gold/EX for your team as you hope that for your death, your team takes out two or more enemy heroes)

Jungler:
- farm the jungle (+gold/EXP for your team through extra solo lane)

The effects increase throughout the game. The more gold and EXP you have, the faster you kill creeps, and so the faster it is to get more gold and EXP. For some heroes, once they start getting their key items, the gold just starts rolling in.

A lot of games come down to which teams manage to get the most out of these three things. It also depends on who has these things. Support heroes should really let carry heroes farm. For the simple reason that the carries are far more item dependent.

Regen items = approx 300g (e.g. 3 x tangoes, 2 x mana pot, 1 x health pot, or maybe branches instead of health pot)
2 x observer wards = 200g
1 x teleport scroll = 135g
1 x boots = 500g
1 x courier = 150g
1 x courier upgrade = 220g

In the first 10-12 minutes of the game, a support hero really needs about 1505g. You start with 603g and over 10 minutes, you gain another 600g passively. That's already 1200g. You really don't need to be taking the last hits while in a lane.

That gold would go to much better use on a carry, who can start snowballing their gold stockpile. That being said, if your carry is failing to get the last hits, you might as well take it, because it's better that you get it than nobody gets it. Or if you are in a ganker/support, ganker/ganker lane, it might be better for the person who is farming mana boots to get the last hits.

Sunday 22 April 2012

Noob Level DotA: Phases of the Game - Middle Game

Games will typically fall into three phases: early, middle and late. Transitions are one-way (i.e. a game that has changed from early game to mid game cannot transition back to early-game), and transitions are ordered. You start in early, move to mid and end with end game (although some games may not reach end game – particularly games with lots of pushing heroes).

(Please excuse my poor Paint skills.)

MIDDLE GAME
Starts: Once people start leaving their lanes and roaming a lot
Ends: Once the hard carries stop farming and start joining team fights

This is the farming and pushing phase. If your team has a lot of support/gankers, and no hard carry, you want to end the game in this phase.

As people are moving freely between lanes, it is not as important to let your team know that people are missing from your lane. However, you need to keep in mind that you might be ganked by 3 or more players, so escaping might not be as easy. A lot of people have the "Don't go past the river" rule of thumb, but my personal rule of thumb is don't go into their control zone unless you have a way out. What do I mean by control zone? Map control is very important in DotA.

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Tower Safety

If you look at this image, the red and blue polygons indicate the "tower safe area" for Radiant and Dire, respectively. The way I picture it, is if you draw a polygon using the three outermost towers and the fountain (and that's exactly what I did with Paint).

I consider this the Fairly Safe Area. You might get ganked while in this area, but you're pretty safe in this area. Note: Being ganked isn't the only way to die, you can still die against people in your lane, so just because this is "safe" doesn't mean you can let your guard down. One of the reasons this is so safe is because your allies (if they are paying attention) can teleport to a tower and help you out if something bad happens. This is another reason why it's important to carry TP scrolls!

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Creep Safety

In this image, the red and blue polygons are the same as before. The purple and green polygons indicate the "creep safe area" for Radiant and Dire respectively. It's hard to see, because the player icons are in the way, but this is where the creep waves for each side are currently at. If you remember what I said in my first post about long and short lanes, this image gives you a better idea of why the long lane is considered safer. See how much closer the purple corner is to the red corner in the bottom lane than the top lane?

If you imagine my Paint shapes drawn a bit better, the area in the purple polygon, but not in the red polygon, is what I consider the Moderately Safe Area. You'll probably get ganked here, and if you are alone in this area, and enemy players are missing from the other lanes, you should head back into the fairly safe area just in case.

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Too Far
If you take a look at this map, the purple player has downed the first bottom tower, and is now trying to push the 2nd tier bottom tower. Notice the large gap between where she is and the red polygon, and how it gives the pink player the opportunity to get behind her.

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Ward Safety
This is a bit further in the game. Radiant are pushing top tower, and even though they are far away from the fairly safe area, the position of the wards (yellow circles) makes it difficult for the Dire to sneak up behind them (unless they use Smoke of Deceit, which I'll cover in another post). The shortest path that avoids detection is outlined in pink. It's unlikely that the Dire will know where the wards are though, so they'll probably end up going via a warded path, which gives Radiant enough warning to escape.

You can also see that the light blue player has pushed quite far on his own. It's OK though, because he's Rikimaru, so he'll just go invis and run away. But let's say he wasn't, if he needed to escape, his safest route would be any route that goes through the area in the green polygon. So if you were trying to intercept him, you could pre-empt that and run to bottom river to try to catch him running away.

And that's what I mean by control zone - the areas covered by towers, creeps and wards. If you imagine the wards as semi-extending the purple area, light blue is definitely inside the Radiant control zone. When you are in the opposing team's control zone, you will need to start heading back earlier than you think you need to, and unless you have invis or blink, you should definitely carry a TP scroll.

This is also an example of why the don't-go-past-the-river rule is bad, because at this point, it's quite dangerous for Dire to push past their top tower. Ignoring the fact that Radiant players are currently in top lane, Dire has no vision past their 2nd tier tower, and Radiant has control of most of the Dire jungle at the moment.

Farming and Ganking
This is an important phase for the hard carry to be farming. By now, a few towers should have been pushed, so the creep waves should be closer to your base. Support should be placing wards to protect their jungle so the carry can farm. They should also be stacking the ancients (the stronger creep camps near the secret shops) whenever they can, and staking jungle creeps otherwise. Support and gankers should also try to kill the enemy carry/carries if possible, or at least make it harder for them to farm. I will explain stacking at some point, I swear!

Team Fights
With the focus on trying to kill each other, and the increased movement between lanes in this phase, team fights will be a lot more common. The success of these team fights will set the tone for the rest of the game. Ideally, you'd have the gankers and supports in the team fights, while the hard carry farms away in another lane/jungle, as this maximises farming time, and reduces the risk of the carry dying in the fight and losing the precious gold they've farmed up. However, if one team has the carry farming away during team fights, and the other team has all five of their team members present, it makes it more likely that the team with four will lose the fights. It might be worth the carry teleporting back before the start of the fight, so they can contribute.

Pushing
Pushing lanes can really help your team, not only for the extra 1000g shared between you, but as you can see above, downing towers increases your control of the map.

Roshan
It's also a good idea to start keeping an eye on Roshan from mid game onwards. A ward on the cliffs outside Roshan's lair is probably enough. Oh, I learnt a new shorthand for Roshan today. "ro3", don't ask me why that means Roshan, I have no idea.

Thursday 19 April 2012

Noob Level DotA: Phases of the Game - Early Game

Games will typically fall into three phases: early, middle and late. Transitions are one-way (i.e. a game that has changed from early game to mid game cannot transition back to early-game), and transitions are ordered. You start in early, move to mid and end with end game (although some games may not reach end game - particularly games with lots of pushing heroes).

EARLY GAME (Laning Phase)
Starts: At the start of the match
Ends: Once people start leaving their lanes and roaming a lot

This is the levelling up phase. Lanes are fairly static and most of the focus is on the lane vs lane battles. There may be ganks, in particular mid lane ganking either of the side lanes, or either of the side lanes ganking mid lane. Very rarely you will have one side lane ganking another side lane (without ganking mid first), because the time spent moving between lanes is a huge loss in EXP and gold (and even the 135g cost of a teleport scroll can be quite expensive at this stage).

As people tend to be more focused on their lane battles, this is the phase where it's important to let your team know when people are missing from your lane."ss" and "miss" are common ways of saying your lane is gone, as you don't want to spend too much time typing at this important phase of the game.

Warding runes (here is the link to the warding guide again) will help whoever is in the middle lane, as well as give an early indication of incoming ganks.

Good wards are:
Top lane Radiant - 1
Mid lane Radiant - 3, 9
Bot lane Radiant - 13

Top lane Dire - 1
Mid lane Dire - 4, 6
Bottom lane Dire - 13
(Although there are better wards, I think these few are the best to try and memorise for now, and once you are comfortable with these, look at the rest of the rune wards section.)

It is also helpful to ward the pull camp (I'll explain more about that in another post). So use 28 if you are Radiant (though 30 is better, it is harder to get right), and 36 for Dire. If you aren't sure exactly where to put the ward, just put it inside the pull camp.

Should I get boots first?
This is commonly seen as a "noob mistake", and Olek and I quite often sigh when we see one of our teammates get boots as one of their starting items.

During the laning phase, you generally want items that accomplish one of these two things:
- help you stay in the lane longer (i.e. regen items): which means more EXP
- help you last hit/deny: which means more gold for you/ less gold for your opponent

Boots may help you by allowing you to move closer/further from the creeps to last hit/deny, and also escape being harassed just that little bit faster, but I believe that 500g can be better spent elsewhere. Especially if you consider the fact that nobody else will have boots at the start of the game, so you'll all be fairly close in movement speed.

That being said, there are some heroes (e.g. Juggernaut) who can get an easy first blood (e.g. with an ally stun/hold/slow hero and his spin, if he has boots (as the opposing hero won't be fast enough to run out of his spin)). So if your intention is to get an early first blood, then the 500g you spend at the start won't be a big deal, and you can stock up on items that accomplish those two things afterwards. Or, if you plan to just roam around ganking, it may be helpful to get boots and two mana potions.

So simply ask yourself whether the movement speed boost from boots is worth losing out on those two other things. And at least you will be walking to and from the fountain faster!

Which lane do I go to?
Because there are 3 lanes and only 5 heroes, the typical lane division is 2-1-2 (2 top, 1 mid, 2 bottom). I'm not entirely sure why they moved to the mid is always solo model. Quick Google (from a LoL forum, ew) lists a few reasons:
- mid will level the fastest, which means when they gank the side lanes, they will be a higher level and the gank will be more effective
- it's the shortest distance back to the fountain
- it's the safest lane, so you only really need 1 hero there
- it also has the shortest distance between towers (yours and your opponents)

So you'd normally have a ranged carry, or ganker in mid. Pudge, Tiny and Bloodseeker are exceptions. Pudge because he can take advantage of the hill to hook the hero, and because both he and Tiny can make good use of the runes and gank the side lanes really well. Bloodseeker because he's a good ganker, and his kill = HP skill means it doesn't matter when he gets harassed by a ranged hero.

As for the side lanes, you have a long lane and a short lane - so called because of how far away from the fountain the creeps end up meeting. For Radiant, the long lane is bot, and the short lane is top. For Dire, the long lane is top, and the short lane is bottom.

You want to put your hard carry in the long lane, especially if he/she is melee. This is because the long lane is considered much safer as you will tend to fight a lot closer to your tower. You also have the benefit of being able to creep pull to bring the creep wave closer to your tower if you push too far. This means one hero can farm the pulled neutrals while the other farms the creep wave - meaning you both gain more EXP overall. You also tend to want a babysitter in the long lane to protect the carry (a support hero who allows the carry to get all the last hits while they harass the opposing heroes). Having the carry close to the jungle also means they can duck in and quickly farm a few camps if their lane is pushed too far and they're afraid to push.

The short lane usually ends up with whoever is leftover after the other two lanes have been filled, but it can be good to get ganking heroes here to stop the opposing carry from farming. They will need to keep an eye on the jungle in case the other team has creep pulled, and also if the other team has a jungler. The soft carry may also be in the short lane, to allow the hard carry to get better farm.

If your team has a jungler, then the lane line-up becomes 1-1-2-jungle, with the long lane solo, mid solo, and two in the short lane. A lot of the time, the carry will still want the long lane, but they have to keep in mind that most of the time they will be solo against two heroes. If the jungler can help them gank, then it's not so bad, but they may find it's hard to farm against two. In this case, you may want a more defensive hero, or a hero with a lot of staying power to solo the long lane (e.g. heroes with heals, or heroes with escapes (blink/invis)).

One of the strat that comes up in pro-level games is the trilane. That is when a carry and two gankers/support (with stuns or slows) go to the long lane, leaving the other two lanes to solo. I'll go into detail in a later post, but one of the advantages of the trilane is being able to be really aggressive and hopefully get a lot of kills on the opposing heroes in that lane. However, if they don't manage to do that, they tend to fall behind in EXP and gold because there are three heroes in the lane instead of one or two.

I wouldn't recommend trilaning until you have a better understanding of the overall game, but it's something to watch out for, as if you end up against a trilane, you will need to play safe (unless they are really bad).

When should I leave my lane?
- when you are on low HP, and you don't think your regen items/spells will heal you in time before your opponents can unleash a combo to kill you
- when your teammates need you to help defend a tower
- once you've pushed the tower in your lane, you should help push other towers/gank, and come back to your lane every now and again to farm the creep wave when it is closer to your tower (as it is generally dangerous to push too far down a lane, as you are further away from the safety of your towers)
 - when you need to put up new wards
- if one particular lane is struggling, it may be worth swapping lanes
- when you see a good opportunity to gank another lane (this is usually when the opponents have pushed too close to your tower, as this means they are far away from their own tower)

Wednesday 18 April 2012

Noob Level DotA: Roles

After Redact's super rage-filled rant yesterday, I've decided to do a mini-series on DotA. This is meant to be aimed at new players, or people who are looking to do more than play an everyone-do-their-own-thing pub game. Before anyone starts saying, "OMG, you're so wrong, how can you say something like that - the pros all do it like this....." the point of this is to give you a starting point to build from, because the learning curve for games like this is so steep it's unlikely you'll go from noob to pro just from reading a few guides. However, if you feel that I am giving completely bad advice, please say so, give your reason, and I'll add it as a note. I am by no means a pro player either, so don't take my words as gospel - just try to think about some of the things I've talked about. Also, this isn't a guide for how to play certain heroes, if you want that, Google it. Feel free to add any advice in the comments!

OK, so one of the most important things I think people need to learn is the roles people play and how this fits into the bigger picture of the game. DotA2 breaks it down into these categories: support, initiator, ganker, carry and pusher. I'd also like to add tank and jungler. The important thing to remember is just because DotA2 says your hero is X doesn't mean you have to play it that way. Most heroes fall under multiple categories, and it all depends on how you build and play them.

Throughout the guide, I'll make reference to this warding guide. If you don't have the time (or inclination) to read and memorise the entire thing, just refer to the sections I mention for the type of hero you want to play.

SUPPORT
Typically intelligence heroes fall into this category.

As the title says, they're the heroes that support the team. Because they are generally not item dependent heroes, they can spend their excess gold on the courier, observer wards and sentry wards. If you end up laning with a carry, you want to level the skills that will help you harass your opponents so that your carry can farm in peace, or level the skills that will help you get kills on your opponents. If possible, you want to let your carry get the killing blow, so they will get more gold (you will still get some gold for an assist).

Letting someone take the kill used to bug me to no end when I started playing, but I realise now how important it is (I'll explain in another post). Still, it is annoying when a player acts like they're entitled to the kill and complains if you get it - even you happened to get it because of a DoT.

As a support hero, your life is worth less than the carry's. If the enemies are chasing your carry, and you suicide in so your carry can escape, that is a good deal. If your carry is farming well, then you might want to roam around and help gank the other lanes.

They don't really shine during games... they just support.

As for warding, you tend to want to know all the positions, but as a starting point, try to remember these:
1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 18.

At a minimum, you want to learn 1, 9 and 13 for early game.

INITIATOR
These are the heroes who will go in first to start a team fight. They will typically have something that allows their team to gain a huge advantage at the start of the fight like a mass disable, or something that causes chaos. Some of the strongest initiators in the game are Tidehunter, Faceless Void, Warlock and Enigma, just because of their ability to disable an entire team. Lich and Sand King can also be a good initiators because their ults can cause confusion as the other team must organise themselves to avoid the damage.

Charles says initiators are the best types of heroes to play for new players, because all you do is go in, do your thing and die, but I disagree. The initiators set the entire tone of the battle. They need to have really good judgement and map awareness in order to time the start of the battle correctly. If they go in too soon, their team might not be ready, and so the initiator jumps in without back up. Or they might misjudge the position of the enemy player, so they end up wasting their mass disable spell.

A good initiator can potentially turn the tide of the game, simply by helping their team kill the entire opposing team.

They shine the most in team battles and typically not until they have their ult and Blink Dagger.

If you are warding, try to remember these positions:
3, 5, 6, 8, 14, 15, 19, 22, 23, (all of the wards in the push section)
At a minimum, you want to remember 3 and 5 as there tend to be a lot of battles around mid, and any of the Rosh wards.

GANKER
These are the heroes who are suited to killing other heroes - because they have really strong nuke spells, have the ability to sneak up on someone and pick them off when they're low, or lots of disables. If ganking goes well, they tend to be overlevelled and overfarmed compared to the rest of the players. They are also good for keeping enemy heroes poor and at a low level.

They shine the most during early- to mid- game.

Gankers require map control, which means they do best when they ward, or have someone warding for them. They might also want to counter-ward the opponents' wards so they can move around undetected. Smoke of deceit also helps with that.

Wards to remember: And of the rune wards, as runes help with ganking. It might also be worth counter warding so that they don't see you coming - although at this level of play, it's unlikely that your opponents will be warding, but if they are warding, it'll probably be in the places marked with the DotA2 icon..

CARRY
Typically, agility heroes fall into this category.

Their job is to farm up good items and just be strong! I am horrible at playing carries, so this is probably the worst advice to be getting, but I'll try! Carry heroes are the ones that can get really powerful late in the game. They can do a lot of damage, the difference between carries and nukers is carries can sustain this damage. As they do so much damage, they can push towers and rax, as well as kill enemy players - so in team fights, it's important to stay alive so you can deal your damage! And if the fight is going pear-shaped, you are entitled to leave the rest of your team to die and run away. It is the carry who generally wins the game.

Carries need to understand when to fight, and when to back out.

There are two different kinds of carries - hard carries and soft carries. Technically, you can build any hero into a carry, but a soft carry is a hero who can carry if they farm well and stay a higher level than everyone else, but if they were to fight a hero of equal farm and equal level, they'd lose. This usually happens to caster heroes, and spells in DotA don't scale very well, their nuke might hit for 300 damage, but this isn't much at end game, when heroes have 2.5k+ HP. Hard carries tend to have fast attack and movement speed and/or spells to make them mobile which let them move in and out of battle and chase down low HP heroes.

Charles says: Don't worry about engaging. Just KS (kill steal) and farm. Always keep an eye out of KS opportunities.

They shine the most during end game.

They shouldn't be warding, they should be saving their gold for items and buybacks.

PUSHER
As the title suggests, the pusher is good at pushing lanes. This is helpful for the team because each tower down is at least 1000g for the team (200g split between 5 players + extra gold if a player kills a tower). And as the ultimate objective of the game is to destroy the other team's throne, they help achieve that goal.

Aggressive pushing early game also means the other team has to play defensively. They may not have as easy access to their jungle, and will have less towers to teleport to making it harder for them to get to fights that are far from their base. It also increases the map control of your team.

They shine the most during early- to mid-game - and while they are also good end game for pushing, the fact that opposing players will have farmed more items by then may counter their pushing power (e.g. Nature's Prophet's treants may be killed a lot faster by a farmed hero).

Wards to remember: All of the wards in the pushing section.

TANK
Typically strength heroes fall into this category.

Their job is to tank - to take as much incoming damage as possible. The benefit of having a tank is that your glass cannon (high damage, low HP) heroes will live longer to deal damage and hopefully kill heroes. I think Axe is the only hero that can force other heroes to attack him, but other bulky heroes may tank simply by being the first one to walk in. In DotA(1), Magnus and Centuar were some pretty tanky heroes, but they haven't been ported to DotA2 yet. Tanks are really a sub-type, and most of them also fall into the initiator category.

They shine during mid- to end-game, when they've bulked up.

Wards to remember: I don't think tanks should be warding, they should be tanking up! But if they were going to remember wards, probably the same as the initiator ones.

JUNGLER
These heroes are ones that can start the game farming the jungle. This has two benefits - they can farm unharassed by enemy heroes (sometimes - although a team that leaves the jungle to free farm isn't a good team), and they allow their team to have a second solo hero (who will get more exp from the lane). They may also come out of the jungle and help push a lane or gank.

The jungler needs to pay particular attention to the middle lane, and the lane next to their jungle, as they're susceptible to ganks from these two lanes. The jungler may also want to stack and pull neutrals (I'll explain that in another post) to help control how far their lane is pushed.

Depending on the type of hero, they shine during different parts of the game. Jungler is really only a sub-type and really only applies in the early game. Once they leave the jungle, their main type takes over (e.g. Enigma is a jungler, but once he farms up Blink Dagger, he becomes an initiator).

Wards to remember: 1, 9, 13, 16 (although you might not want to block the camp, depending on how fast you farm. I can't seem to farm fast enough to reach that camp, so blocking it might be OK for me).

If you are only going to remember two, remember 1 and 9 and just keep an eye on the lane nearest your jungle.