Diary Post -- #Blaugust2021 Day 24

Pardon me, y'all. I'm going to do a bit of a diary post today. Yesterday was a pretty interesting day and things are starting to get busy.

1- School has begun for all the kids. ALL the kids. The youngest is now in Middle School. The middle kiddo is a senior in High School. The oldest is in their second year of college. My job with all of this is to make sure they're up, fed, ready to go, and drive 'em around as needed. Check and done.

My dudes.

2- The Cats -- Zoodles is staging a small rebellion with her food, and Timmy is an absolute maniac. Timmy leaped all the way up on top of the countertop yesterday. Zoodles NEVER did that. Not happy with Timmy's newfound vertical freedoms, but we're adjusting.

3- Work is in full swing. I'm currently working on two games at once, and it's great! Lots of work, lots of fun. No details for the general population -- just know that I'm excited for all the stuff happening at WIMO.

4-  I played Overwatch with my buddy Mercedes last night. It was only a handful of games, but to be honest, a return to Overwatch for me is a big deal. I kinda sucked, but I tried, and we still won 3 games. Mostly it was great to talk with Merc again. If any of my highlights were even remotely worthy of showing off, I would.

Torbjorn my boy!

5- I also played Project Gorgon a bit yesterday. I sold a bunch of stuff on the Auction House and had an absolutely horrible time farming for Superb metal. Yuck. I also got sucked into a guild group to run the Wolf Caves daily mission, and it took FOREVER to complete. This tends to happen when you have groups leap frogging over each other and party members that afk.

MAKIN' THAT PHAT CASH!

6- Greek Food!  Uber Wife bought some frozen gyro meat and I used a sparse amount with a ton of salad and a touch of taziki sauce to make a sort of a gyro taco on a corn tortilla for lunch. Ahhh, gotta love the struggle of trying to limit carbohydrates and fat while being diabetic, but it was still good. Dinner was the left over greek salad that I used to make the gyro. :)

7- Music -- I've been working on a new collection of music, but it's slowed down a bit here for some reason. I want to blame my lack of music on the overabundance of blogging I've been doing, but it's something more. I want to write 2 more songs in this style and then edit them all down into a cohesive album of music.  That's the plan at least. Here's a small peek at a new track I've been working on.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Tom Purdue (@tompur2)

So that's it . . . that's the blog post. I'm kind of struggling here at Day 24 to get a daily blog post out, but I'm managing over lunch and early in the morning to find some time to write. (Listen . . . it was either this post or talking about how it's the fifth anniversary of Loot Chests in DCUO.) 

Happy Dueling!

Overwatch Night Redux and Holiday Thoughts

The KI Krushers (no, we really don't call ourselves that) started our 2021 season with a bang, smack, and a heal last night -- just like it was 2018!

Since there were only 5 of the 6 from our standard team representing, we opted for Quick Play instead of Competitive matches.

5 up, 3 down! I'll take it!

Those wins helped me finish up the last of the holiday event and snag the Frosty the Roadhog skin on the final night.

Hideously jolly, ain't he?

Earlier in the week I played a good couple of hours with The Art of Warlord and Renee Wooften, and I when I'm with that group, I'm all about playing Reinhardt. Because of that, I went ahead and spent my coins on the Conductor skin, which was one of the three that I wanted from the event. It's all good. I'll eventually get the zen and the torb skins I wanted -- unless Overwatch 2 comes out and we stop playing Vanilla Overwatch altogether.

Choo choo!!! Tickets please! *bleep* kill sound

That said, it'll be interesting to see what 2021 does to Overwatch. The word on the Internets is that Beta will begin sometime this year and that Overwatch 2 will be released "late 2021." I'm imagining late 2021 is very late 2021. When it happens, I imagine the whole gang will jump over and want to try something new.  As for Overwatch itself, I don't know . . . we'll probably get a new hero, a bunch of new skins, a couple new holiday mode games, and a couple maps?  Maybe?!  Sounds reasonable, doesn't it?

What I do know is that Lunar New Year is coming up in February and we'll be getting some new skins for the event. Master Ian Gamer crafted up a "skins prediction" excel graph in a recent video. He's putting his bets on Symmetra, Bastion, Soldier 76, and Orisa.  He also points out that being the year of the "Metal Ox," Orisa would be the PERFECT candidate. I have to agree. He's right, she is basically a metal ox. It's a missed opportunity otherwise.

Happy Dueling!

Putting the Elf on the Shelf in Overwatch

I love the Overwatch events that give you a couple free sprays and a new skin for winning 9 games. 

ended up getting those last three wins late last night -- Woot!

That carrot on a stick is all the motivation I need to log on and play several games, and there will be three of these types of events running through the Holiday season. The first of which was to earn the green elf Junkrat skin

Oh man, could totally be my new favorite Junkrat skin!

If you're interested, you only have the rest of this weekend to earn him and then it'll cycle to the next event, which happens to be Gingerbread Ana (too bad she doesn't actually look like Ana made out of gingerbread), and finally the last event will have us hunting after Frosty the Roadhog, which you also get a nice preview of on the start menu.

Of course Junkrat steals all the cookies while flanked by Frosty the Roadhog!

Outside of those skins there are the typical smattering of purchasable skins including Penguin Mei, Toybot Zenyatta, Conductor Reinhardt, Ice Empress Moira, and Lumberjack Torbjorn. 

Sadly, I like ALL those characters and there's no way I'm going to be able to get them all.  My favorites out of the bunch are for Zen, Rein, and Torb. Who knows!? Maybe I'll get lucky and win at least one of them before it's too late and the event goes away. I mean, the game did give me an old event skin last night in a loot box.

Sigma Rime skin, eh? I never play him, but I'll take a free Mr. Cold Miser!

Anyway . . . I've got some time off work for the holidays . . . it's possible! GET THEM SKINS!

Happy Dueling!

Proptapalooza: Fandom Change'mups with a Fan Art Twist

Welcome to Day one of Promptapalooza, a really cool idea from Belghast at Tales of the Aggronaut. It's kind of like a parade of blogs through the month of August while also providing a month of writing prompts.

Belghast makes some very good points about toxicity and the exclusionary nature of some game communities. As he states:

" . . . I see an awful lot is what can be collectively termed as “Git Gud” culture. There is a constant thread of trying to push “scrubs” out of the community and force them to play better. I think in some ways this starts off as a somewhat toxic altruism… like that players are being “bad” because they don’t know any better so folks will take it upon themselves to “educate the bads”. I mean there is an awful lot of hyper cringe content in the early years of this blog that would fall into this category. The problem however is that this does not take into account that folks often times come to a game for different reasons. There is the false assumption that every player is playing a game for the exact same reasons you are."

Yes! Preach on, Brother!  I've seen that plenty in every game community.  He makes great points and you should definitely check out his post.

Now in this post, I think I'll take a similar view at the games I'm currently playing with also a slightly different angle. I feel that ultimately the greatness of a community can be judged by its creative content. 

Project Gorgon

The only thing wrong with Project Gorgon's fandom is its size and lack of complexity. It's vocal minority is tiny and tends to stick to itself. This is undoubtedly a result of the game population being small and older. Unlike other communities, I don't see fan art or a ton of creative endeavors happening in the game. It might be happening somewhere on a small scale, but I just don't see it. I did find one person who drew their character. That's it.

So . . . I'm doing my part as well . . . I made a remix of the Serbule Dawn theme song the other day and have plans to make a video for it eventually.

Tom Purdue · Serbule Dawn In The Quiet Countryside (Ursula Curse Mix)

Small communities need your creative love too! Even if your art and words won't get a lot of likes.

Overwatch

Oh man, I'm not a part of this fandom, and I don't think I ever could be because of the "get gud" mentality that Belghast mentioned. I'm more on the edge looking in . . . that said . . . I have in the past done things like join the Houston Outlaw's Discord server.  Being on a server for a professional esports team inside of a game you play was interesting. Did you know that in Overwatch, people make fanart of the professional players as well as the characters in the game? It's amazing.

It's completely different from a game like Project Gorgon: this game's fandom is enormous, thriving, and diverse. Its YouTubers do everything from talking about metas and upcoming patches to fun and cute videos based around the characters. Dillongoo is amazing. He re-imagined all the characters in Overwatch as cats! Again! Just amazing creativity.

The fanart here is so plentiful that a search on a hero's name and "fanart" will get you a lot of hits . . . and . . . some stuff you'll wish you could erase from your mind. I guess that's what I'd change. Less fanservice from the fringe and less toxicity from the haters. Butwatchagonnado? That's just a result of a huge community based around an FPS hybrid like Overwatch.

Wizard101

Guys . . . you don't know how cool the Wizard101 community is. Full warning, I'm incredibly biased here. Being this game's community manager for a few years, I've seen it all.  The highs and the lows. From crippling 2017 DDOS attacks on our game's anniversary to Make a Wish visits from fans who become a virtual part of the game. What I've learned is that every community has its saints and devils. All you can hope for is that the good outshines the bad, and that's definitely the case in Wizard101.

(**UPDATED SIDE NOTE: After thinking about this a bit . . . I just want to be sure to mention here that, yeah, you still try to eliminate the bad. You ban, you discourage the bad, you encourage the good, but for all those efforts, it always seems like when you squash one cockroach another 10 appear. That said, you never STOP trying to improve. Felt like that needed to be said.)

The majority here is kind and caring. It has great artists that love what they do and love the characters in the game they play. It has everything from what I'd call "glorious grandmas" to small kids and big kids alike. On its average days it's super lighthearted, happy, and welcoming.

The artists that love this game are super quality. In fact the background picture for this blog features my wizard101 character as drawn by Dearly Doodles.

I love it so much.

I wouldn't change a thing . . . other than I wish I was a little more involved than I am currently.

~~

There's probably more I could discuss here. If you have any additional thoughts about what you'd change in a fandom, feel free to leave them in the comments below.

Thanks Belghast for running promptapalooza! I'll be posting on and off throughout August, but probably not about every prompt. My day is August 6th, so I'll for sure see you back here again when that happens.

Happy Dueling!

Finding the Zen in Overwatch

I haven't talked much about it here on my blog, but I'm still playing Overwatch every Wednesday night with my coworkers. I first mentioned our group back in August 2019, but I'm pretty sure we've been at this for over a year now. (KI Krushers never stuck as a team name *frown*)

For most of our group, the Wednesday night game has become our only time spent in Overwatch for the entire week. Because of this, our CR ratings have suffered or floundered a bit. I feel like you can't really REALLY get good at this game unless you have a knack for being nimble-fingered, watch a ton of training videos, or play until the game just flows through your veins. I kind of feel like we're not alone here though. I'm sure they're more of us dirty casuals than there are Overwatch Adonis dopplegangers.

That all said, man, we had some solid placement matches this week! Things have really evolved in Overwatch over the past year: new heroes, hero balancing, role locking, and now hero rotation (being the most recent change) to name a few.

Hero rotation can be really impactful, or not at all, depending on which character you typically play in game. Now every Thursday in competitive play, four or five characters get put out of play and are unable to be used. Last week that took away several of the characters our team typically plays, and it had me doing something I typically don't do . . . playing Zenyatta.

Throwing a fastball or two at Orisa! Talk to the hand!

I have the "Fastball" skin on Zenyatta that turns him from looking like a robot monk into a robot shortstop, and it felt amazing to break him out for some reason. In fact, he was pretty much all I played for our comp games on Wednesday! I was putting Orb of Discord on people and calling it out in our Discord channel like it was made for that purpose. BOOM! And for the most part it worked really well. Put Discord on someone and they really start taking damage or flee until it goes away.

After our matches I went back into the game to use another newer feature in Overwatch that I LOVE -- Replays. I imagine most people use Replays to watch their game play over so they can improve or really digest what happened in a match.  Me?  I'm looking for screenshot moments! :)

Here's a few I snapped from our first game of the evening:

Velo looking as fierce as a Hamster can.

I fear the day that Velo can't play on his Hammond character. He really knows how to disrupt the enemy team . . . especially if there isn't a Mei on the other side. ;)

Are you really not going to shield against Kajind's Hanzo?

In our first match of the night, we believed we had a Reinhardt player who was trying out Sigma for the first time. It was pretty bad. He was consistently out of position without a shield, and boy did we take advantage of that.

Show 'em who's the better Sigma, Snarky! 

Sigma's bare feet were a perfect target for my fastballs turns out. ;)

Some people go for headshots, not me! Footshots FTW. 

Figuring out when to drop Zen's ultimate is all about the timing. Transcendence makes me invulnerable, and everyone around me gets a ton of healing. Typically you wouldn't want to use it for trying to save your team from rip tire, but I was nice and cozy here when I was obviously his first intended target. The blast has a radius, so you can typically save a few people, but at the epicenter of riptire is a 600 damage bomb, and no amount of healing will make you safe. The people on the fringes of the explosion will be good though.

He circled me a few times with the tire hoping trans would end early. 

Fastball coming in! 

It became kind of comical how out of position this guy was. 

This last screenshot I have for you today was of the enemy Symmetra. I just loved how tech noir this shot looked. I mean, two seconds later she died a horrible death to Hammond and Pharah, but thanks to the Replay feature, I got a shot I wouldn't mind using as a Desktop Background. ;)

As a bonus she's wearing the new Holi skin!

I may have played a lot of Zen in the games on Wednesday, but I really found the "zen" by going through the replays after the matches. The ability to zoom around and pan to epic moments in replays is probably the coolest thing about Overwatch for me.  I wish replays like this were more a standard feature in all games . . . as impossible a request as that might be.

Happy Dueling!

#Blaugust2019 Day 22 -- The KI Krushers!

I had a great time playing Overwatch last night! That's saying something as well since the past couple weeks, uh. I've been really NOT interested in playing Overwatch. But Wednesday nights for me are typically Overwatch Comp nights where I play heals for the officially unofficial KingsIsle Comp Team! I tried to make us a logo once for fake jerseys but . . . it didn't stick.

See what I did there? KI . . . Krushers?  Also, who wouldn't want to pay homage to the amazing Overwatch league recruitment video where Krusher99 is a scrappy kid who makes his way through the ranks to play as a professional!

Anyway last night we did really well, and the team hung in there for me to complete my five "support" placement matches to help me get placed.

We ended up with four wins and one loss, and the loss we did have was really close.

For support I played my boy Lucio as well as Mercy and Moira. I typically play a little Bridgette, but after her changes, she just isn't the same to play. (Special thank you to The Art of Warlord who played a few Quick Play matches with me before my comp matches so I could come to that decision before playing comp tonight.) Brig just feels a little weaker now, so you can't just be crazy with the front line anymore . . . or at least I can't, so until I figure out how to play Brig again, I'm stickin' with the classics.

I love playing heals for these guys:

• Elik, who typically plays Pharah for the group, was on heals with me last night. 
• Kajind typically rocks the Hanzo and sniper types. 
• Silversteel flexes and usually plays heals with me, but last night he was one of those scary DPS players . . . and when he plays Symmetra, it's terrifyingly awesome.
• Snarkygoblin is typically our shield tank. SOLID! Love his Rein play. 
• Velo typically grabs a tank spot and that's usually Hammond.

The above list features a director, a designer, and four software engineers. You know what . . . I'll call my healing for these guys "Dev Appreciation" for Blaugust this week. ;)

Happy Dueling!

#Blaugust2019 Day 1-- It was Overwatch killed the beast

You know, I used to play a wider array of video games until Overwatch jumped into my life like a Winston with no cooldowns, but now I've logged ~700 hours on that single game. And I still suck at it. Well, my Reinhardt is pretty scary.

OH! Those poor fools running into my ultimate!

If you play any Overwatch recently, then you know the big talk of the town is the incoming 2-2-2 role lock change.  For those of you who don't know anything about Overwatch, that means soon you'll have to declare up front in a match that you will play a dedicated role for the group, either Tank, healer, or DPS. 2-2-2 means that your group will now always have two healers, two tanks, and two DPS. It's a "beauty" of an idea that's had a "beast" of a debate, but overall people feel it's going to improve the game.

I'm sure it will . . . and if not, well, there's always Overwatch 2.

From what I understand, you'll actually do your competitive placement matches now on a per role basis, which is interesting. In my comp group I play heals about 80 percent of the time, the other 20 percent of the time I play either Mei or TORBJORN!

IT WAS TORBJORN KILLED THE BEAST!

Oh my gosh I love my new summer skin so much.

Anyway, our comp group has done a lot of switch-on-the-fly calls in the past where if a certain defensive team isn't working, one of our swaps is to a team where I play a more offensive role.  It's still a 2-2-2 comp for us, but once PTR hits live, we can't do that. I'll always be playing healer. That's OK in the long run, but it feels like flexibility for the group took a big hit. On the other hand, no longer will we see a 6-DPS meme team in comp mocking us for not being able to handle them.

One cool side benefit from all this is that, now I could play Comp outside of my group of friends in a totally different role (like tank) if I wanted to and not have to worry about getting out of the SR range our comp group needs to play together . . . either in the positive or negative . . . I worry more about the negative.

There's some speculation over on the Overwatch forums that the real losers from 2-2-2 are those that only play DPS roles, since that's the most popular role to play . . . or so it seems. Will there really be 20-40 minute wait times for a game? I have no idea.  Those that enjoy it say it's to be expected and will be worth the wait.

All I know is that I'll probably have to take my love for the beast, aka Torbjorn, over to the arcade where apparently the old mode of quick play will still be sticking around. That's a beautiful compromise. 

Happy Dueling!

A Reinhardt type of a weekend

I had a lot of fun over the weekend, both in real life and in Overwatch. Lemme break that down for you.

First up, it was my beautiful wife's birthday on Sunday, so we all celebrated with outings to a couple of great food locations like Waffle Love and Kerby Lane. We also worked hard planting a new tree and improving on a backyard project we've been working on this Summer.

Tearing up all that grass and laying down all that mulch was not easy, my friends

Secondly, the kids scored the new Super Mario Party game for the Switch. While I haven't had a chance to play this yet, I did spend some time watching over their shoulders, and it looks awesome. I'm thinking there will be more to say about this in a future blog post of mine.

Third, I worked just a bit more on my Roblox level finishing up the walls of level 2 from my epic Maze creation.

That big open area in the maze will be a "zombie village" eventually

Finally, after a break of a couple weeks, I played a lot of Overwatch over the weekend! Vanessa Mythdust and I finished up our Competitive Placement matches (yeah, as expected, I'm still in silver), and just had a lot of quick play fun, which is mostly what I do anyway. To those ends, I mostly played Reinhardt . . . it's what I do.  I sprinkled in a few bouts of Mei, Doomfist, Junkrat, and Pharah, but it was pretty much a Reinhardt type of a weekend.

A better version of me would purchase a new computer and spend time filming or streaming a lot more of my Overwatch play, but I'm happy to at least be able to show you a few of my highlights.

It's a lot of me swinging my hammer on or near the point. ;) There were a few great moments in there like when Leala and I combo'd our ultimates (totally planned . . . we wish) for an amazing quadruple kill and like when Ana boosted me up right after a shatter and many hammer swings brought me the tears of my enemies.

Unbeknownst to me, there was even some streaming going on where Chris beheld my more competitive side.

All in all I'd give the weekend, 4 Reinhardt Hammers out of 5.

Happy Dueling

Overwatch vs. Paladins Updates

Both Paladins and Overwatch had updates over the past week, so let's take a moment to give you TFN's condensed and quick thoughts!

Paladins
You can read the full update notes list here, but TLDR:

• Adding more lootbox stuff.
• Made it so you can control Grohk better during his ult (it was crazy before -- but this is also a nerf since he could move incredibly fast.)
• Console players can report bad behavior now (didn't know they couldn't)
• Queuing and re-queuing has been improved (yep, I'm really digging this change)
• Other hero bug fixes.
• There's stuff they know are issues, but . . . THEY'RE WORKIN' ON IT! GET USED TO IT KID! .

There's a new robot Grover skin, which makes no sense, but that's cool

Overwatch
You can read the full update notes list here, but TLDR:

• NEW MAP -- Busan -- and you can check it out in the Arcade currently!
• Hero gallery filters added.
• See your team mates through walls more easily.
• Weapons with spread now will have their damage calculated more correctly.
• Bridgette will now also get knocked down if she charges charging at a Rein or a Doom during their charge powers.
• Rein's shatter covers the payload better and other areas as well. (Can't tell you how upset I've been when I've shattered and the stupid Bastion player on the payload didn't get knocked down by my ultimate -- this is a good change.)
• . . . and other hero balance changes. (I ain't listing them out.)
• GM comp players can group up with lesser folks
• Rialto's payload goes a bit faster. (woot for the attacking team!)
• (And although not mentioned on the notes, Demon Hunter Sombra skin for Blizzcon!!)

There's more there, but I figure if you really want to give it a read, you already have.

Busan Screenshot courtesy of IGN.

~~

It's interesting to compare and contrast the notes. It's not surprising that Paladins is going to patch in more lootbox stuff and be straightforward about it -- that's how they make their money. Overwatch is also in a different spot for updates as they monetize differently and are in a different stage of development for the game. (That said, I really hope the rumor is true that the Demon Hunter skin coincides with a Diablo 4 announcement??)

Busan is a collection of relatively cool maps. They are a bit hard to defend from my past couple of days playing there, but I'm sure as time goes on, I'll have more insights. Here's a quick video of four highlights from playing last night.  Nothing amazing here, but it does give you a glimpse at where some of the action happens on these maps.

I really hope Paladins keeps growing and adding more stuff. I'm pretty close to throwing down the $40 for a full character unlock. Of course, I'll let you know when that happens. In the meantime, really happy that queuing up now has less roadblocks. That's a plus.

As for last night's Overwatch session at Busan . . . I had a lot more fun playing Mei than I did Reinhardt, but I still played him when needed. Maybe I'm not quite as burnt out as I thought I was in that previous post of mine. Time will tell, but I'm still here playing!

Happy Dueling

The Woes of Getting Out-tanked

I play a lot of Reinhardt on Overwatch. Most days I'm perfectly happy to queue up as the tank, but then there are days where things are about as painful as can be (as keenly portrayed by the Art of Warlord)

As a shield tank, the game is designed to destroy you again and again. Your shield eaten away by a Bastion, punched away by a Doom, slammed and stunned by a Bridgette, hacked by a Sombra, blown 50 feet in the air by a Jankrat, slept on the ground by an Ana . . . and MORE!

But the WORST thing as a tank is when you get out-tanked by the other player or when you're not supported as well as the other tank. A few examples:

• Executing a beautiful ultimate (5 on the ground!) only to find that no one is there to finish the job with you.
• Charging an opposing Rein or Doomfist and your team doesn't take advantage of the other stunned player (but the other team definitely takes care of you) 
• A Lucio or Mei coming up and hassling you with your shield up and no one is killing them.
• Wasting an ultimate because the other tank tricked you out of it
• Better positioning
• Better Ult Charging
• etc.

As a Rein, my eyes are always on the other tanks looking for moments when I can take them out of the equation -- I get mad if I can't do that. It always feels like if I can out-tank the other guy, then our team is going to win. If not, it's an unhappy ending.

 That said, I really think there's no one to blame but myself. A few examples:

• I kind of take for granted that people know what I'm doing and why, and I seem to not communicate very well during the heat of the battle. 
• I don't watch the kill feed closely enough to know if what I'm doing is too risky or not. 
• My situational awareness as a tank is lower than it should be. 
• I Leeroy Jenkins far too much and too often. 
• etc.

So with all that said it feels like I've peaked with Overwatch as a tank unless I can evolve as a player. I've identified what I need to improve on above, but after a bad string of losses, I don't know . . . it makes that original happiness to queue as tank much less joyful.

It's just feels a lot more fun to play as a DPS or a tricky support character like Mei or Lucio. I guess I wish it was just more fun to play a tank rather than someone who hassles the tank. Maybe a bigger hammer? Maybe a different character? Maybe a different game?

*shrug*

Happy Dueling!

Some Doomfist Thoughts

I have 40 hours on Doomfist, which isn't much compared to those peeps who REALLY play Doomfist, but I've learned a lot from playing him including when it's just not working and when it worked so well I don't know quite what happened. I love a good mystery, so let me just type out a few things that I do know about the character and how I play him.

He's the bad guy

Not only is he the bad guy, he's the leader of the bad guy team called Talon. That isn't the reason I play him though. Originally I started playing him because I had been owned by him so many times playing Reinhardt, that I wanted to play him more to understand how he plays.

His achievements are hard to get

To get his Air Strike achievement, it feels like you typically have to be in a "125" position on the map already, which are a little hard to get to and you have to have an enemy kind of not moving around when you launch it.  A "125" position is somewhere high enough that when you launch Doomfist's Siesmic Slam ability, he will come crashing down to build up enough speed to fully charge his Siesmic Slam to 125. The really good Doomfist players will always talk about "rollout" spots where they use geometry to get themselves kind of stuck in a strange high up area of the game and then use this to slam down on people and get around. It's hard . . . I'm not good enough yet to do these things. Mercedes also taught me a neat trick about getting high up by using his ultimate, so . . . there's still hope for me. :)

To get his Cratered achievement, you have to catch all six members of the other team in his Meteor strike ultimate ability, which almost never happens since everyone is typically super spread out and even more so when they see a giant red circle on the ground where he's going to hit. I'm still waiting for that perfect Zarya ultimate combo with my meteor strike . . . maybe someday.

He's challenging to play

The number one comment I hear from my buds when they play the Mystery Heroes arcade matches is that Doomfist is their hardest character to play. Blizzard marked him as a 3-star difficult hero, and I believe that's because to play him, you are always being put smack dab in the middle of the action. If you've expended all your cool-downs and are in the middle of the action, you're about 1 second from dead. You have to save a cooldown to get out of the action to hide, and you have to know where that safe spot is.  If there isn't a shield tank or a good corner to hide behind on a map, I probably won't play him . . . probably . . .

After 40 hours, I still find him difficult to play, but also super fun because:

It's awesome punching people

Seriously, punching someone and watching them fly into a wall from your punch is amazing. Doing a huge uppercut and sending other people into the air is hilarious. Where as widowmaker might get a full charged headshot on someone and get a "one shot, one kill," Doomfist fully charging his punch and smashing someone will get a "one punch, one kill."  I like that kind of power.  It's great for killing squishies.

He causes mayhem

One of my favorite things about playing him is the confusion people can have from when he's bouncing in and out of combat and just throwing people off their game. Knocking the tanks around and out of the way opens up people that were previously hiding behind the shield for attacks from your team. I'm all about the mayhem.

He has some cool skins
I own some good ones . . . just look how awesome these are . . .

His original skin is pretty cool too.

That's on my desk at the office btw

If you're really interested in playing him, watch a few vids

I'm not going to link any here, but simply searching Doomfist Guide on YouTube is going to net you a handful of them. They have way more tips and suggestions than I could ever give. I've watched a few of them and they really do help and they also help just knowing that even the pros struggle with this character sometimes.

Happy Dueling!

High (Ho) Silver, Away!

Overwatch's 11th Season of Competitive Matches has five more days until it's over. I don't know what that means for you, but what that means for me is that I need to finally get these placement matches out of the way, so I can get a spray that I never use and earn a few more points toward this golden weapon thing that I will never obtain!

You see, the Austin Potatoes just don't do a lot of comp matches. We generally like the more laid back atmosphere of quick play and tend not to extend ourselves outside of that. That's what potatoes do. That said, we'll always give placement matches a go at, like, you know, the last minute.

To be honest, Vanessa MythDust and I were rocking those matches over the past couple of days. 

Curse you random disconnect!

(That one loss pictured above was actually a disconnect that counted against me.) And sure . . . we ended up losing those last two placement matches, but I'd say it was pretty great overall for us. 

Back in January, I did my first ever placement matches and ended up mid-gold with an SR of 2372 -- this was back in my days of playing Pharah all the time. After that I had switched to a Reinhardt main and did another round of placement matches that didn't end so well and my SR plummeted to low silver. Since that time we've been working our way back up -- just through placement matches mind you, because that's how potatoes do -- and this time I ended up with high silver.

 So close to gold!

After placements, I stuck it out for another tragic loss and both Vanessa and I were both done with placements for Season 11. Here's how we're looking for that, team.

Don't worry my friends, I am your shield. 

Pretty 50/50 between Rein and Doom with some Pharah and Junkrat sprinkled in for good measure.  I had an excellent round as Pharah, scored 33 elims, and was able to play my rocket air guitar emote a few times, which is the most important unrepresented stat in that picture above.

The end result was that Vanessa and I felt better about Comp Matches! They typically are a cess pool of taunts, disparaging comments, and utter discouragement, but we didn't get that this time through.  I'm sure if we played Comp enough, we'd find that behavior again, but one week before the season is over, it sure felt full of more people just like us -- generally chill peeps who just want to have a good match . . . and win! (And not just throwing a match on purpose to get into bronze; I realize that happens.) I may end up doing more comp matches in the future if it stays this chill.  I'd much rather be earning points toward a golden fist or hammer than not.

And while you're here reading about Overwatch, you might as well also see the latest Animated Short if you aren't one of the 3.6 million people that haven't caught it yet.

What do you think, is this a set up to learn more about the guy with the hover bike? I sense future hero!

And also check out this Reinhardt Karoke from the Overwatch play test server. I will absolutely be doing this when it comes to the live game.

Happy Dueling!

Let's talk Overwatch?

Listen, y'all.  It's The Art of Warlord's fault . . . straight up . . . that I play Overwatch. Make no mistake. I would have NEVER given this game a shot if it wasn't for Morgrim hounding me to play this game so much.

There was a Twitter spat and everything.

Then I finally caved and started playing on a free weekend last November, dubbing the game "Junkrat" instead of "Overwatch" because that's the only character I played for the first couple of weeks. Watching my first ever highlights reel video is hilarious now. It consists of me spamming at the enemy group, using riptires out in the open, and I think the final clip is even from a medium bot match.

Since then I've clocked 370 hours of game play and fallen in and out of love with various heroes, but what I've mostly found is that no one really wants to play the tank . . . so that seems to be where I fit best with Reinhardt.

That's 93 hours playing Rein -- not quite the 100 hour mark, but I'm getting there. When I still had my beard growing, I kinda even looked like a Reinhardt main.

Don't worry my friends, I am your shield.

I also switched my main DPS to Doomfist from Pharah because I play a lot with "Elik" from work who mains Pharah. I need to make a more up to date Doomfist highlight reel, but here I am in all my "punchy guy" glory:

I'm curious to find out how many of my followers play Overwatch. It's totally different from the usual game I write about here on TFN because traditionally I'm a super passive PvE playin' type of a guy. I mean, you "could" technically play Overwatch as a single player game, but that would be pretty boring ultimately. If only they made some kind of practice bot match somewhere in between Medium and Hard? (I mean, look at a game like Dota II and they've got their bot difficulty tuned pretty perfectly. I'd play bots on Dota II all day and still feel like I had a good challenge. It's probably intentional . . . I doubt they want you playing bots all day.)

As it is currently, I mostly queue for quickplay matches and mystery heroes either by myself or with the self-dubbed "Austin Potatoes" group. We're the potatoes because . . . that potato aim though!

Outside of this, I've recently had the pleasure of playing a bit of Overwatch with Miss Courtney Olivia. She plays an amazing Junkrat btw . . . So if you tune into her Twitch channel you may even catch me there from time to time? Maybe?

I've been kind of wanting to try another Team Fortress 2 / Overwatch knock off game called Paladins. If you have some experience with that game, please give me your thoughts in the comments.

Happy Dueling!

Hello, old friend!

I haven't posted on the Friendly Necromancer for quite some time, so I thought "Why not just say hello and see who's out there and willing to read along if I blog a little?" Let's chat!

The big news for me of course is that I have a new job at KingsIsle! I announced my departure from being a Community Manager on the forums and on KI Live. Now I'm taking a new direction in my professional life, and it's one that probably seems a bit unexpected from those who mostly see me as a "communicator." It's probably more expected from those who see me as a creative person. If you don't know me, I love to be creative, whether it's making music, or writing blogs, or crafting poetry, or what-have-you, I love to create THINGS.

No need for me to reflect too much, but some of my best times at KingsIsle were when I was a brand new community manager for Pirate101. I loved that position and what I was able to do with a new community. As all things do, that position changed and grew to where I was not only doing work on the Pirate101 community, but many other things as well. (NOTE: Ask me in six years how my Designer job has evolved from now.)

Being a Community Manager is pretty intense, and I don't think those who haven't been a CM can really know what it's like. Even describing it to someone, it always sounds a bit strange. Ultimately, you're a gatekeeper, a town crier, an advocate, a marketer, and a "fun committee" (and more!) combined into one person. Every day brings a new challenge.

It's super cool my company has allowed me to shift into a new role so I can grow and learn: and that I am! This is all good stuff.

~~

Some other cool things have been happening too! Like this amazing picture that Dearly Doodles made for me:

IT'S A ME! FRIENDLYO!

And, as to be expected, I've been playing a lot of games (outside of the ones I play all day for work) like Neverwinter . . .

Currently lost somewhere in the Jungles of Chult.

. . . and Overwatch.

I'm a #dumbfist wanna be (but mostly play Reinhardt) main

I've got a tentative date of "sometime this week" to also finish up the Medulla fight in Wizard101 with Blaze and Tara, so who knows . . . I may even have some more Wizard101 gameplay to share in the future!

Anyway, I just wanted to get this first, uncomfortable, and long overdue post out of the way. Hopefully I can post a bit more again soon, and maybe even try my hand at Twitch streaming again. (I don't know if you happened to catch my marathon run of the game Overgrowth, but it's three and a half hours of bad voice over and animal on animal violence. GOOD TIMES! I want to do that kind of stuff again!)

Let me know what you'd like to hear more about here on The Friendly Necromancer. It's been a long, strange road . . . hasn't it? So what's been going on with you? (That's a request for comments, yo.) 

Happy Dueling!