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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

Wash It Like It's Hot

Continuing from yesterday's topic, I was at a men's health seminar at work and he asked what's the one thing that's guaranteed to get your wife hot. Nobody offered an answer, and he replied, "An oven." Then he added a washing machine, lawnmower, making the bed in the morning. Someone said that it's known as "choreplay". I did a Google search and found Chore-play: Motive your man. The basic idea being that you reward your husband for doing chores with sexual favours as a way to motivate him to do more around the house. This is one of the comments that stuck out for me:

 According to "Men are From Mars" writer, John Grey (and personal testimony from myself and friends) Women work on a "pre-pay" system, while men work on a "post-pay" system. Have you ever felt like you do SO much for him and he just doesn't seem to give as much back? That's because he thinks your "paying him" for something he's already done! He doesn't know what he did - but it must have been good because just look at how great you're treating him!

I am not sure whether that is true or not, but I guess if you can see that applying to yourself, then maybe you should try to pay more attention to how you are treating your partner. This isn't limited to chores, I think it is good to find out what is and isn't important to your partner. That doesn't mean you ask them to give you a list of what is important, and you just promise to do those things. Firstly, who carries a list of all the things that are important to them. Secondly, that list is likely to change, as things that are important to you right now, might not be of the same importance tomorrow, or in a few month's time. Lastly, and this is the important one, if you need to be told what to do, then it means you don't care enough.

You could argue that you do care, because you are willing to do all the things on the list, but the difference is that you are doing those things because you were told to, not because you realised they needed to be done of your own volition. It seems like a strange concept, and nitpicky, but I guess it's a bit like playing HoN. You can have someone watch over your shoulder, and tell you exactly what to do, but if you really think about it, the person watching over you is really playing, and you are just an input device (and probably a bad one at that). However, if you learned how to play, learned the mechanics, item builds and strategies, then it would be you playing.

That being said, a game like HoN is a very hard game to pick up with no prior experience. I've tried to keep this as gender neutral as possible, but it's a lot like the complaint that women don't come with instruction manuals. While guys may not know how to "operate" us, I don't think it's entirely their fault if they get it wrong. Good software is intuitive, and anything that doesn't make sense right away should have a tooltip or guide on what to do with it - and that should also apply to us.

I think that MrMan5.5 and I are currently in stage 4 (comfortable), and while things aren't always perfect (we've moved into stage 5 a couple of times lately), I think we have a good thing going. We both have our own hobbies and we are no longer at that stage where we feel we have to share everything (like when you are in the honeymoon stage, and are perfectly happy to see that chick-flick, or sit around watching your partner play a game). But we still have things that we do together, and most nights before we go to sleep, we talk, and laugh, and that's the time I feel like we are reinforcing our relationship. (Though I think I'm letting the team down, because I spend a lot of nights gaming until right before I need to be in bed.)

The last time we went to stage 5, I was really angry at MrMan5.5, because I felt like he wasn't doing nearly as much as I was. I didn't want to be a nagger though, so I kept quiet about it (sound familiar?). But then I'd get so mad that I'd start becoming really cold to him. I'd eventually tell him one of the things that made me angry, but not all of them, so it wouldn't be long before the whole cycle repeated itself. And like in the video from yesterday, things that normally wouldn't bother me would start to bother me because I was already so angry.

So even though it was a men's health seminar, I think the presenter said something that applies to both genders. "Anger is for violence. When you are angry, your heart starts beating faster, to prepare your body to fight (or flee), and that is not the best time for rational thought."

I do recognize that in myself, which is why I prefer to withdraw into myself when I'm angry, because I need time to cool off, and let rational thought return. But you don't always have that luxury. The presenter suggests making both  hands into fists and then taking a deep breath, and opening the fists as you say, "Stuff it!"

The next part is to realise that it takes two to tango. Whoever isn't angry might feel like they did nothing wrong, but if that were true, then why is the other person angry? It might be one of those irrational why-can't-you-read-my-mind angers, but that is a sign that there is a breakdown in communication. I got really angry that MrMan5.5 didn't put dirty dishes in the sink, and so he'd end up with a bunch on his desk. I decided that when I was washing the dishes, I wouldn't pick up his bowls and just wash everything else instead. He never took the hint, and so I got even more angry, which was the wrong thing to do. I told him to put them in the sink, and now he does.

Strangers

Albert told me to watch this video (Strangers, again: 16m 20s):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSdELZxEnHY

For those who don't want to/can't watch it, he talks about how he was with a girl, and everything was amazing, but after a while it died off. He said there are 7 stages in a relationship.

Stage 1: Meeting (2:33)
When you first meet each other (in this case, bumped into each other while running). The great thing about this part is that you never know when getting to stage 1 with someone will lead to moving to stage 2.

Stage 2: The Chase (3:37)
He says it's usually considered the best part. It's when you can't stop thinking about the other person. You secretly keep checking their Facebook/G+/Twitter, you are excited to see that they're online, you stay up later than you really should talking to them, and somehow you manage to spend hours talking with each other. Yet when you are with them, you feel nervous and excited.

Stage 3: The Honeymoon (4:24)
When everything is perfect. You're happy to do anything, but you want to do it together.

Stage 4: Comfortable (5:01)
When you're comfortable being yourself around each other. When you can start to say no to that movie that, in all honesty, you don't want to watch. When you stop thinking of new and exciting things to do together, and are just happy doing whatever you want to do, and sometimes what you want to do and what your partner wants to do overlaps, so you do it together.

As he said in the video, this isn't always bad, but can lead to being taken for granted. Which leads to...

Stage 5: Tolerance (6:27)
You argue with each other, or you make passive-aggressive statements to try to avoid arguments, but that just turns into a delayed argument.

Stage 6: Downhill (8:27)
Being together isn't fun anymore, but you stay together because you're together, and you don't quite want to give up on it just yet.

Stage 7: Breaking Up (9:19)
The end.

He says the next stage is going back to how you were at the start.... strangers.


I think that most long term relationships will fluctuate between steps 4 and 5. That might sound like a bad thing, but I think it's good. For steps 2 and 3, (usually) a lot of effort is going into the relationship. Sure, it's fun at the time, but imagine having to do that for the rest of your life. Think of that episode of the Simpsons where Apu showers his wife with presents in the lead up to Valentine's Day. I don't think anyone could do that every day.

I remember a conversation I had with Lucy a while ago. Sex and the City movie spoilers ahead: We were watching the first SatC movie, and we got to the point where Miranda was arguging with Steve about how he slept with someone while they were separated. He said that he wasn't happy with the fact that they never had sex anymore. I think the movie was portraying Steve as the bad guy, but Lucy said that part of the fault was Miranda's. Why couldn't she just suck it up and have sex with him just to make him happy? The lack of sex was obviously a problem for him, so if she really wanted to save the relationship, why didn't she do it instead of getting angry at him and making him want to leave her even more?

I think that's what stops stage 5 from becoming stage 6 - whether one person in the relationship is prepared to take one for the team, and I guess that's why it's called "Tolerance". And what pushes a relationship into stage 6 is when one person feels like they have been the bigger person too many times, and they just can't bring themselves to do it anymore. Even if the other person suddenly realises what a jerk they've been and decides to put in some effort, it's too late. They might suck it up this one time, but that's not enough compared to the number of times the other person has had to do it.

(As a side note, I think that proposing or having a kid can help move the slider back towards stage 4, but there are really only so many times you can do that, and if you really have to resort to that, maybe you should be thinking about whether there is really something wrong in your relationship.)

Getting late, so to be continued tomorrow.... if I remember what I was going to say.

Engagement Party Idea: Engagement LAN

So MrMan5.5 and I were tossing up the idea of having EngagementLAN - a LAN instead of an engagement party. We've come up with a few ideas, but I want to bounce them off people here in case they can think of a solution to some of our problems.

First, I want to say that the size of our families means our wedding will probably be huge with family alone. So we've decided not to invite friends to the wedding, and instead the engagement party will be for those who we would have liked to invite to the wedding, but they aren't family. But considering it's a LAN, that means we have to limit the number of people we're inviting. So when the time comes and you do not get an invite, don't feel like we don't love you and you weren't important to us. You just weren't as important as the limited number of people we could invite. =P (But more likely, the reason is because I do not consider you enough of a gamer to enjoy yourself at EngagementLAN, I'm thinking of doing maybe just a dinner with friends who I would have liked to invite, but didn't fit that criterion.)

So the first problem is venue. Ideally, we'd hire a hall, but that can be expensive, especially if we're adding food and alcohol to the cost. The other idea was to just hire a large house for a weekend instead and some tables and chairs, though I'm not sure about the cost of that either. We've dismissed the idea of just hiring a LAN cafe out for a day, because their computers are generally pretty poor, and even if we were allowed to bring our own peripherals, they usually don't allow food or drinks from outside, and I don't think people will survive on potato chips and Coke.

The next part is an idea Graham and I came up with - bride vs groom. So the people at the LAN can sign up to either represent me or MrMan5.5. We'd have competitions throughout the night and the winners will contribute points towards whoever they chose. At the end of the LAN, the loser (read: MrMan5.5) will have to suffer a punishment. There are a few things we are unsure about with this idea.

How do we go about team balance? It will probably be hard to balance based on skill, as that is subjective, and I doubt anyone could really give an honest appraisal of their own skill (for instance, Vinnie underrates himself by a lot, and a certain person from SEE thinks he is much better than he really is). There might also be a problem with more people being on one side than the other. Add to that the fact that people will probably want to play with their friends (e.g. I don't see Nem and George being split up at all). I guess we can have people pre-register which game they'd like to play in, and which side they want to play for, and if we need to move people around, we can contact them beforehand to see if they're OK with it. 

The last problem is games. Here are the games we've come up with so far:

- Team Fortress 2

- Goldeneye: Source

- DotA (maybe HoN if we have access to the Internet)

- Starcraft 2 (if we have access to the Internet)

- Super Smash Bros. Melee/Brawl

- Mario Kart

- Pictionary

- Blazblue

- Armagetron

- Band Hero/Singstar

- QWOP?

There's probably a bunch of things we haven't thought of, all we have at the moment are these rough ideas and a guest list. Please give us feedback/ideas!

Star Whores: The Old Republic

Rather than say I've already waxed lyrical on this topic, here are a few of my previous posts on the topic of female gaming from various views (the older comments and posts got mangled during the Windows Live Spaces -> Wordpress transition, but you can still read them with a bit of effort):
Guy In Real Life
World of Whorecraft (read the comments for dramaz)
Sucks To Be Female (kinda serious with good comments)
Gaming Gender Wars, Revisited
(H) Is It A Bird? Is It A Plane? No, It’s A Girl on the Internets (actual post is really naive, read the comments)

When we joined a PUG to down Grandfather, the group realised that there was no /roll function, so they didn't know how to assign the loot. I jokingly said I wanted it for my companion (it was a belt with Cunning and Bounty Hunters need Aim), some people took me seriously, and someone said "he was a good healer". MrMan5.5 corrected that person and said, "You mean SHE was a good healer." I got angry at him, because I didn't want the entire operation group knowing my gender, especially when people were discussing distributing loot, but he said it doesn't really matter. (Olek ended up getting the belt though - they had to use an external random number generator to decide.)

I've even gone so far as to tell the people who know me in real life not to mention my gender, although I missed one person, who I sent a text to tell the guild leader that our power went out, and he ended up revealing it to the guild. Not that it really mattered in the end, as I have become a semi-operation leader, and need to talk a lot on Vent anyway (though nobody has called me a 13 year old boy yet, which is good!).

I was wandering around Dromund Kaas questing when the following conversation occured:

(Apologies for the size and my fail cut+paste skills)

(I thought that "lfg Saving Face" was nicely placed - don't know if that person was making a comment about the conversation, or actually looking to do that quest.)

I can't really tell if that was an actual female, or a troll. It sounds a lot like a troll, but you would think that if someone were trying to troll people in general chat by being a female, they wouldn't be so bad at it. Which is what leads me to believe that she's a female (unless that is what he wanted me to think).

Dromund Kaas is the new Barrens and you have to wonder why someone would be whoring themselves out there. It's the second zone that people hit (not counting the fleet which is a "city"), and so is full of people between levels 10 and 16. Some of them are alts, but even then, most of them are unlikely to have masses of credits, or are able to powerlevel "her" through anything.

My guess is that she moved on after nobody took the bait and tried again on another planet. I was tempted to whisper her to ask if she was really a female to find out what she was trying to get out of the whole thing, but I didn't want to get reported for harassment.

Strange as it sounds, that whole conversation gave me hope. I think MrMan5.5 is right, and that it doesn't really matter anymore if people know that you are a girl, as long as you aren't trying to cause drama. Plus, it seems the male gamer population is so jaded and suspicious anyway, that even if you did say that you're a girl, they'll probably think you must be 30-year-old, male basement dweller with no life, multiplied by a factor of 10 for every piece of Rakata gear you have.

I think Diver really hit on something though, and I have to admit, part of the reason (I mean in the past, when I was still single) I don't want to chat up male players to get stuff is because it would give them the impression that I looked like this:

When the reality was more like this:

(Not that the stereotype is true, I know a lot of female gamers of various sizes.)

I thought what if one of them was "the one" and I had led them to believe something that wasn't true. Then if they ever met me, they would be super disappointed and that would overshadow everything that had happened between us. Though I get the feeling Jaqx wasn't looking for "the one" in General chat - unless that is her method of searching, to which all I can say is good luck to her. =/