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The Summoner's Guidebook: Staging the perfect comeback in League of Legends
The chips are down and you're behind. The enemy has only two turrets down, and your inhibitor turrets are barely standing. Your own jungle is warded, and the only thing that lets you know your enemies aren't going for Baron is that you can see them charging up your mid lane. We've all had those kinds of games in our League of Legends career. While I'm a big advocate of surrendering early, there are those who want to fight until the bitter end. Is there any chance of winning? Maybe, maybe not. This week, we'll look at how to win games when you've probably already lost.
Blood Sport: Having fun in the arena, part 2
Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women? C. Christian Moore, multiple Rank 1 Gladiator, examines the latest arena strategy, trends, compositions and more in Blood Sport. My internet is still down. Yes, this has been two weeks of hell. No Google, no easy check on the weather (I have a motorcycle), no instant directions -- and most importantly, no images or videos of scantily clad ... orcs. World of Warcraft has been out of my bloodstream for yet another week. Having fun in arena is one aspect I don't necessarily need a WoW window open to write about, so we're going to cover some bases that I might have forgotten last week -- namely, how to be a good teammate and encourage a fun atmosphere, and having fun while both winning and losing.
What If We Lost: An argument for losing a major lore-based battle
Warning: This article does contain spoilers for the Argent Coliseum Raid. If you want to be surprised, skip this article!There's a pretty long thread going on in the General Forums right now that makes an interesting request of the dev team: Let us lose. The argument goes that we've been sort of steamrolling our way through massive challenges and insurmountable odds pretty much the whole raid game, and it's just getting boring. Nothing feels like a threat anymore. We know we're going to defeat it and move on. We need to shake things up.The more I think about it, the more I like it. Why not let us be on the losing side, at least for a few patches? The Lich King himself could use a bit of help in that vein, for sure. The early leveling game did manage to conjure up a few heart-stopping moments where Arthas "let us win," but when it was time to take that to the next level, it seems like Blizzard's sort of backed off and gone stale. Now, we're holding a Ren Faire on his front lawn while his scourge mostly mills around aimlessly and doesn't make more than a token attempt to do anything threatening.There would be no quicker way to get him to burst back on the scene by having him or one of his lieutenants deal us a devastating blow, one which we will find it hard to recover from.
Shifting Perspectives: Poledancing and you
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, Michael Gray fills in for John Patricelli, to discuss more about mobility for healing Arena Druids.Allison Robert wrote a pretty solid summary of a Druid's life in PvP as a moving target. This week in Shifting Perspectives, I'm focused on a specific aspect of your life as that moving target. I'm talking about one of the most quintessential Resto-Druid skills in small-group Arena play: Poledancing.
What to do about perpetual losers?
Many Alliance players have this impression that the Horde is constantly united, more cooperative, and generally understands how to play better than the Alliance does. Whether this is true or not is not something I myself can speak for, though I have heard my Horde friends say they have just as many clueless PvP people as the Alliance does. So perhaps both factions can relate to Mendax's complaint that so many people seem to go into the battlegrounds with no idea how to win, and somehow fail to learn how, even in spite of playing a great deal and getting a lot of good gear. Their tendency is just to go in and lose over and over again, repeating the same old proven-to-fail methods for various reasons: possibly because they don't know anything better, possibly because they don't care anymore, and possibly because they've already identified themselves, their faction, or everyone else in their faction as born losers.In any case, Mendax thinks that Blizzard should make the battlegrounds themselves reward you for better play, so that the game mechanics themselves encourage you to play in such a way that you're more likely to actually win. First of all, they could provide more honor for kills near contested objectives (such as flags or towers), and secondly, they could deny all bonus honor if you lose. His first idea quite interesting -- I like the possibility that the reward system of the battlegrounds could somehow teach you to play better in itself, if that's really possible. However, while I can understand his reasoning in removing all bonus honor gain for losing teams, I think this would just make the "losers" stop queueing up altogether. We might be happy to get rid of whiners, complainers and all them, but in the end would the increase the waiting time in between battles be worth it? And in any case, would the "losers" really go away, or would they just look for ways to get around the system?
WoW is a game -- you're supposed to enjoy it
In the battleground matches I've played lately, it seems that somehow the number of people complaining and whining has decreased, even though our faction seems to be losing just as much as before. Instead, the Alliance players I fight with seem almost depressed, as if every match is a torture to them -- they don't shower blame on other people, but instead say things like, "I have a dream that one day we might win a BG," or "Golly, this is horrible, I hate Alliance PvP." They have their heart set on a particular PvP reward, and as soon as they have enough honor or marks, they will heartily abandon their fellow teammates to the sad task of losing to the Horde day in and day out.It's true that losing isn't fun, and whatever the reasons our side seems to be losing all the time seem quite outside of our control. That's hard no matter which faction you're in. But there is a thing we've all heard about growing up called "good sportsmanship." When we play competitive games with each other, the idea is that we're supposed to enjoy the actual playing of the game more than the winning or the losing. Indeed, as with anything in life, if you get too attached to the outcome of a particular endeavor, you are less likely to do well than one who plays for the love of the game itself.I've been thinking about this lately because I myself don't want to log on to WoW only to feel like the game is like banging my head against the wall. It has helped a great deal to realize that whatever rewards we get are more like milestones along the path, not really an end in themselves. After all, if I play, it should be because I truly enjoy playing, not because I absolutely must posses some item that will be out of date in a few months no matter what I do. This realization has enabled me to pace myself, so that I don't allow long losing streaks to carry on for hours and ruin a good part of my day. If I'm losing a lot, I can stop and do other things, then come back to it another time with an entirely fresh set of allies and opponents -- and more importantly, a fresh desire to do my best and improve my skills. WoW is supposed to be fun; but if it isn't fun for you anymore -- whatever the reason -- then it's time to either change your approach or do something else.
