games you played today: winning eleven

my memory of last story is that it was trying so hard to be a breath of fresh air that it wound up feeling very inessential. I don’t miss that era of everyone trying desperately to reinvent themselves

my memory of gravity rush 2 is that the game and the world and the mechanics are all sublime and then they could just not figure out how to build an actual story mode out of it, literally the demo is better

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also it makes sense that the expansion was better regarded because “wounded soul, longing to get back what the city took from them and get free, maybe even run away together… once they pay their debts” is like the only compelling characterization in the whole stupid thing, and they just made every NPC in the expansion into that. it’s just such a weird B- so much of the rest of the time.

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Played the first level of Hi-Fi Rush. Wow this is way way better than I expected it to be.

Took an obnoxious time to get my ps4 controller recognized.

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The animation is some of the best 3D stuff I’ve ever seen in any medium. It is frightening.

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Heartening to see The Last Story and Hifi Rush getting another look in the same day. I think both are pretty unique in their respective genre but sometimes get a weird rep for tone. Enjoy the videogames!

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there’s occasional phantom draft events, no entry fee, no loss limit, additional rewards for wins 1 2 3. the issue with making it a permanent free queue is that huge proportions of players would play only in it and not pay to win with currencies.

right now the most fun is either Starter deck duels (free preconstructed) or Jumpstart (entry-fee partial preconstructed). both are tuned to be a bit swingy

welcome to the meta. also lol Alchemy

at least in real-card Ranked, there’s a deck-weighting algorithm that tries to match you up with someone with a similar-strength deck. so you might have approached the deck list of a meta deck by chance.

I use this to my advantage when trying stupid jank: the Play queues are very sweaty as people who can’t hack Ranked try to shark players trying out kitchen table brews, but in Ranked you get matched up with other ‘like minded enthusiasts’

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I think most of the play modes use a “Total Card Weight MMR” + “Player MMR” with priority given to Total Card Weight. I’m basing this off of what I remember from looking into it more closely 6 months ago.

It’s overly stratified meaning you tend to run into the same Net Decks that match your card weight. There is no adjustments for synergy or composition, just combined total of value of cards added together. The values of cards are informed by data and win rate but still hand picked by Arena staff and meant to be hidden.

The combined result of this is that “The Meta” is to construct a deck that counters a popular Netdeck which has a Total Card Weight MMR which equals the counter deck.

Putting together a kitchen table deck is severely punished because you’ll unknowingly put highly weighted cards together that force you to go against optimized Net Decks, but without the specific synergy that caused the cards to be weighted so highly in the first place.

There’s a long video that goes pretty deep into it. Needless to say I had already suspected a system like this was happening and had quit playing a few years ago as I didn’t like feeling so at the mercy of the algorithm. It was interesting seeing more of what that algorithm looked like.

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I got my second win in Balatro, this time with the blue deck. I focused on one hand type and constantly upgraded it. What I did wouldn’t have been possible without a couple of jokers that you don’t start the game with. It’s interesting the way rearranging your jokers can be part of the strategy. In this case, I had to swap the position of two of them after the first hand of each round for maximum efficiency.

Edit: I also got a win with the yellow deck.

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Somewhere between all the Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D sessions a few days ago I played through the story mode of Angel at Dusk, which wasn’t very hard but holy shit, what a visual/aural experience.

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Pretty sure MTGA does not currently use deck weights in Standard ranked but it’s definitely there in Brawl. Like lately I’ve been watching miffy play ranked using her own brews on a new-ish account that hasn’t spent any money and she’s still going up against decks with way more fancy cards in 'em.

Ditch Alchemy as soon as you can @Mokushka, I also spent too long playing it cuz I figured the default mode must be the mode but SButts set me straight on that. Shame some of its cool ass skeletons aren’t available in Standard though…

People are probably using the lifegain decks cuz the new starters make it easier to build off and I think it may require fewer rares? The game is pretty fuckin’ stingy, it is hard to build a library of cards for free. I personally hated playing against the lifegain shit but then I built the bats deck after Bloomburrow came out and now…I love that shit (as long as I’m playing it), it’s so cool making bats get really big and imagining someone on the other end of the world blowing a gasket as they watch all these counters go up. I love to make strangers miserable while playing games, that is a great joy, you cannot shame me for this, I am generally very cheerful in person but online I want to fuck and humble every single random I come across.

November was the first month since I dunno February? March? that I didn’t hit Mythic rank in constructed and it kinda bums me out but also who cares, I missed out on what, one free pack? I hopped between decks constantly and probably spent too much time trying to make Orzhov lifegain work, maybe I shoulda just stuck to mono Black like half the playerbase (I can’t fault them for that cuz I also love evil ghoulies…)

I dropped all my gold on a Foundations draft this morning and went 6-3 which would have been a 7-1 had I not misclicked twice at crucial moments that cost me games. It felt really bad!! Then I used my winnings to do another draft and went 2-3 cuz I played terribly even though I felt like my deck was pretty good. Anyway gambling rocks, I love gambling (as long as it doesn’t cost me any money).

Also I love this game, it’s kept me sane this year, I would like to play it way more in paper against people who aren’t miffy but finances make that hard so thank goodness for Arena eh, thank goodness.

YEAH BABY YEAH

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it 100% does, I have a terrible combo deck I’m brewing and mostly play against BU planeswalker control decks that are stuffed with mythics in Standard Ranked, at Bronze, instead of the tedious red mouse deck

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i was farting around in terraria for a few days until at one point i was like ‘what am i doing’ so i’m playing tunic now. i went from charmed to frustrated coz i kept dying at one point and couldn’t figure out what to do … but then i went somewhere else and now the game’s pretty easy lol. the music’s nice! i’m being trained to run against every wall that might have a nook behind it and it’s getting a bit tedious though

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Thank you, will do. I was under the same exact impression. I’ll see what it takes to convert my deck to Standard.

Oh, for sure. My own (not net) deck is also a counters-go-up deck, just in a different way. It’s absolutely fun and satisfying. My griping wasn’t with the deck it’s self to be clear, just with having to go against it in half to three quarters of all my matches. But i am considering googling the exact counter to it just because I’m so fed up with them and want to put them in their place, even if I generally have more fun crafting my own deck.

Sadistic online gamers unite! I love that point in the game where they start taking 2x longer than anyone should ever have to even though though they only have two cards max in their hand to think about, and you know it’s because they are stewing over how you creamed them (and their totally meta deck that they were sure was a queue smasher) with your fun, unique deck.

And then I start spamming them with "Your go"s and the animated emoticon of the two wolves smugly chuckling in front of the annoyed lady.

This game has been my entry point into playing MtG. What I’d like to do is, once I get settled on a (Standard) deck and have finished tuning and tweaking it, I want to collect just those specific cards into a physical paper deck. And then maybe I’ll try crafting another deck and doing the same.

If you ever feel like it, reach out to add each other and we can clash decks and trade some friendly blows. I only have one deck right now outside of the starters though so be warned, I’m not very interesting to play more than a couple times. But I do want to design more.

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Hifi Rush has great fundamentals but the presentation and the level design are like 30% too cheap in a way that kills it imo. like if you compare it to DMC5 which was content not to move the genre forward at all and was basically just to give Hideaki Itsuno something to do in between dragons dogma games, it could be so much more interesting and fun moment to moment, rather than just having a solid skill ceiling and a good moveset and good bosses.

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woah, BMing isn’t winning with dignity. assume the best and take the win. and report them for unsportsmanlike code of conduct violation if they’re dragging out the loss

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I’m not dignified. They also gave me the emojis for a reason. I don’t bring them out until they’re taking an extra timer run every single turn with one card in hand on their turn, and also every time I play an effect card that the game lets them read first, so that I’m also waiting on them on my own turn too. (This cadence magically only started once they realized they are losing)

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I just report the salty losers if I can be bothered, and started playing windowed so I can check websites while waiting. BMing is easy enough to mute so you probably won’t catch a temp ban, but check the first part of the code of conduct

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You mean the general terms on being respectful and sportsmanlike? Sure, I guess. The game doesn’t even have actual chat so it’s not like I could even say anything actually grotesque, even if I wanted to.

If I was sitting at a physical table with someone in a competitive game, and then once they realized they lost, they started just staring at me for a whole minute at a time while doing nothing before finally making some basic plays, and then also going “hold on let me read that card” every time I play something that I’ve already played twice this game before, and staring at it for another minute before handing it back to me, I think I would probably respond somehow, whether that’s to say something out loud to call them out on it, or get a ref to step in. And is pretty BM it’s self.

In an online game with zero chat, that’s not an option and also the stakes are lower so who cares. BMing has been a part of online gaming since forever, I personally don’t think it’s a “problem” unless you’re actually saying hateful crap or telling people to go you know what themselves, or etc. I feel like what I described doing is the equivalent of teabagging someone in Halo, except I’m only doing it to people who are BMing themselves in a different way. But I guess that may be a fundamental difference in views among people. I just feel like if you’re that sensitive, you’re probably muting people anyways, like you said.

If you read forum posts and etc, I see people talking about emote spamming all the time and have never seen anyone mention getting punished for it, so I have a feeling that as far as a game like Arena is concerned where there’s no actual chat, that particular clause is just some CYA catch all statement the lawyers copy paste into everything.

what is BMing cuz my brain can’t seperate it from bowel movements. I get the gist of it just not what the letters stand for

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Same question

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