The Serpent's Tongue: Review and Commenting page

Marko`s League of Legends How to guide: Elo rise

2012-06-04T21:05:00.000-07:00

IMPORTANT TO KNOW

Although this is very very very fucken obvious... You must have the mindset to always try and win regardless of what happens. There will be times when you have trolls that run down mid over and over and die 15 times in a row... then leave. THERE WILL be times, when you have 2 leavers, or scrubs that go 0-10. THERE WILL BE TIMES, when you want to fucking rage quit. However, if you always play to win every single game, your chances will always increase. And every single time that you make an epic comeback and you win the game despite all odds, your elo will increase slowly... and steadily....Rather than giving up, Play TO WIN MAN. I'm sure everyone in this game has one of those stories to tell where they've made this epic comeback against all odds. How did you make the epic comeback? There can be multiple reasons.....Usually when you're in a 4v5 situation... your opponents begin to become complacent and rule out all odds of losing ... because its a 4v5. Your enemies start to think " How is it possible to lose man?" .... In Solo Queue... you can always win and you can always come back.

How an average lol player reacts to a leaver,feeder , or scrubnub: The average lol player does not always play to win. As soon as they see the slightest bit of a disadvantage; they either start to rage, afk, or rage moar. :(

I'm not saying I always play to win.... because I clearly don't. But if I were to aim for rank 1 or have some sort of elo raising goal... I would definitely always play to win ^^.

The Mindset of winning is very important.

BE POLITE IN CHAMPION SELECT

Champions, Champions, Champions... There are those players that can only play one champion... but they play them really really well.

There are those players that can only play one champion, and they still suck at that champ.... however they suck at every champion more.

Let them play that...or ELSE.

And there are those players that play several champions... a jack of all trades... but a master at none.
The jack of all trades usually does decently and is very very consistent. As they play more and more, their elo will raise steadily.. ( If they always have the mindset to get better) . It will be easier for this player to learn more champions.

How to deal with people in champion select .

Is is very very important to communicate with every player in champion select, so everyone can get the champions that they desire... which will result in winning. However... usually not everyone can be happy ^^.

Rule #1: Always give the one trick pony, their desired champion.... Or else they'll feed.. and you've lost at champion select.

Rule #2: If you ever hear Mid or AFK... You should probably give them middle.... Unless you're confident that you can carry 4v5. Most likely they'll feed intentionally anyways.

Rule#3: If you want to play a role, try to call it RIGHT away as soon as you get in champ select.

So yeah, just tell people the roles you can play. I recommend learning one champion in each role.

At the end of the day, you want every player to be happy... if there are already problems during Champion select.. imagine the games man.

GOOD TO KNOW THINGS ABOUT CHAMPIONS AND PICKS

Being a one trick pony is not a bad thing.... as long as you always play to get better, you'll naturally get better at the game. There have been players that has hit rank 1 with only one champion.

Back in Season one, Westrice was ONLY able to play Akali and he always dominated his games. The thing about champion select is that you never know who you're up against so.... chances are your main will never get banned out. In Season One, Akali was not a top pick... Westrice dominated the Solo Queue ladders and hit top 5 with that champion. HE WAS ONLY ABLE TO play 1 champ. After that... Akali was always banned. Poor dude :(

Chu8.... He played the game for 3 months... switching from Heroes of Newerth. He invented SoloMid Maokai and was able to reach rank 1 on the solo queue ladders with ease.

These players were only able to play one champion... Look at them now. As long as you play to learn, you'll always get better. Once you've learned the basics of laneing, team fights, and objectives- You can apply the same concepts to each role and champion.

Top players can play anything decently.

If you truly want to raise elo.. there are two ways.

Pick,learn and master the champions that are considered "very strong " or "overpowered" .. Once they get nerfed... move on and learn the next Flavors of the month.

Remember that the FOTM's will get banned most of your games.. However the games that you actually get to use them.. make it count.

#2 : Get sooooooo good with a champion that is pretty balanced...that you'll always win more than you lose.

The good thing about this ...is that those champions will never get banned.. and you can use it as your instawin card.

BE GOOD AND TAKE CHARGE

Taking charge and commanding players is essential. Your chances of winning greatly increases as soon as every player starts to work together. Because it is solo queue.. it is very hard for everyone to act accordingly to the situation. There are champions that are innately built to command a single team with their skill set..

An example would be Sivir. It is easy to raise elo with Sivir because when you press R, it either means Engage or Disengage. In a situation where you're obviously winning, your team will understand and run in with you. However if you're being chased down... and you press R... your team will run away. Sivir is a strong pick to command a team with simply pressing a button.

Engaging with a tank. When you're playing the role of a tank, you must understand that it is going to be your job to engage most of the time. By playing the tank role and engaging, you usually get to choose the battles. It is very important that you understand how the team fights are going to go.. before starting a fight.

Ultimately, if you're doing well... your teammates will be more prone to listen to you. If you're having a good game and you have a pretty good score.. your teammates will follow your commands. From just being one player out of 5 that affects your chances of winning directly, you've increased your effectiveness by multiple folds... by being able to command your teammates.
Play well, People will listen.

OBJECTIVES IN RANKED GAMES

League of legends is not all about killing and scores. Its usually about objectives; towers, dragons, barons, inhibitors. I've played games where i was 20-4, 15-3,16-8... and i've lost. LoL is not about just murdering champs ...its about killing champions to open up objectives.

When you pull off a successful gank, it allows you to get; blue buff,red buff, dragon, towers and even barons. At the end of the day, everything will end up into a gold amount which you've achieved for each play you've made. Think about each play , and understand which the best plays/options are and see how each play affects the game. Once you understand, you can do that next time ^^.

When I lose and have a very good score.. it is.. because I'm too worried about ksing my teammates to have a good KDR/score and am worried less about objectives.

KNOWING WHEN TO BE AGGRESIVE

A VERY VERY IMPORTANT chapter in this guide. So.... I'm sure everyone has those games where they do really well.. go 10-0,11-0,5-1,10-3 and LOSE. If you're seriously playing to win, then dont get cocky. Only take calculated risks. There are games when I go 10-0 and then I start to go rambo and think I can 1v5.... and I bait my team into dying.

When you have all the kills and you're doing well, it is YOUR JOB TO CARRY.

HOPE IT HELPED YOU RISE ELO

Hopefully.... you've learning something in this short guide. These are the rules I set for myself back when I was trying to raise elo. See you on the fields of justice and renember kid`s spin to win. :D

My Diablo III Game Review

2012-06-01T05:50:00.001-07:00

Diablo for me is not just a video game. Its a whole chapter in my life. It reminedes me of my childhood and my old friends, we use to bring our computer`s to a friends house and play Diablo II all day long. With the new Diablo coming out i just couldnt resist to do a review on it. Ive been playing the game since May 20 and here`s my review of the game, hope you enjoy it and see you on the burning steps of Caldeum and New Tristram.

STORY:

The story in Diablo III isn’t extraordinary, but it is intelligible and enjoyable, which means it’s improved over previous games. The main plot follows a fairly standard path of deception and corruption and concludes in a predictable way — especially if you’re familiar with Blizzard’s story tendencies. Diablo’s greater success is providing charm and humanity through incidental dialogue. All of the game’s NPCs have interesting back stories that are revealed through chunks of dialogue as you progress in a very Bioware or Left 4 Dead sort of way. These impromptu discussions are well-written and often humorous. By the end of the game, I was actually attached to some NPCs because of their dialogue, which is a new experience in a game that’s usually about clicking a bunch of demons to death.

GAMEPLAY:

The big question here is “Does Diablo III feel like Diablo?” and it absolutely does. You still click on a bunch of demons and collect glistening loot. There are some tweaks to the formula in Diablo III though, and nearly all of them fix problems you never realized were problems. The biggest change is the game’s skill system. Unlike previous Diablos, you never actually attack with your equipped weapon. Instead, all of your attack skills work as modifiers on your weapon’s basic stats. Equip a faster weapon, and your skills will come out faster, and the same is true for weapons with higher damage. It works, but it is a little logically incongruent, especially when your character does an attack that doesn’t involve your equipped weapon at all, like blowing darts.
Here’s the smart bit though; every time you level, you’ll unlock a new skill or a rune for an existing skill that modifies its behavior and appearance. This, combined with different enemy types, means that Diablo III constantly prods you to experiment with new skill combinations that can drastically change the way you play. For example, as a monk I had a combination of skills that would pull enemies towards me then do area of effect damage. Then I tinkered with my loadout and created a set focused on dashing and knockback, meaning that I was zipping all over the battlefield slapping enemies around instead of pulling them to me. This is an incredible improvement over Diablo II, where you’d dump all your skill points into one or two select skills and do the same attack all game.

There are a host of other tweaks on top of the core mechanics that make Diablo III a more enjoyable experience. Sub-quests called “events” are randomly generated into the map, and if you stumble across one, you’ll get a ten-minute quest involving saving a group of bystanders from monsters or running through a dungeon to find the treasure at the end within a time limit. This capitalizes perfectly on Diablo’s sense of spontaneity and is a great way to break up the hours of demon slaying. The game’s crafting system is simple and brilliant, too. The results you get from crafting are randomized, meaning that you have to roll the dice and hope you get the stats you want. You also have to invest money in the crafters so they can level up to make better equipment, which is a fantastic money sink and prevents the in-game gold from becoming completely devalued like it did in Diablo II. There’s even an in-game auction house that you can use to capitalize on rare loot drops that may not fit your class. It functions nearly identically to the auction house in World of Warcraft, and it’s trivial to search for equipment or list your own for sale.
In fact, I have to get incredibly nit-picky to find something worth complaining about. You can’t compare gear to your follower’s equipment, which is a slight headache. You also can’t run around with the map overlay on, which is also a slight inconvenience. Uh…crafting recipes don’t pull items from your stash, meaning that you have to have the components in your inventory… and that’s about it. The limited and minor complaints I have about the game should speak more to the game’s quality rather than its downsides.

Of course, that’s all ignoring the elephant in the room – online DRM. While I expect logging in and playing stable games will be less of an issue going forward, it’s still a hassle to log in to an online server to play by yourself. That means you’re at the mercy of lag and disconnects even when you just want to play a quick twenty minutes. When a server goes down or you can’t log in ‘cause your internet is screwy, you can’t play the game you bought and that’s no different than a bug or a crash interfering with the experience. Like everyone else, I experienced several disconnects and connectivity problems in the game’s first week, and that’s a real problem that shouldn’t be ignored.

ONLINE UPS AND DOWNS:

Though you’re technically online even when you’re playing alone, Diablo III deserves special mention for how easy it is to play with your friends. You can add a friend from either their battle.net e-mail or via their battletag, which is a chosen handle with a random number appended to the end. Once friended, it’s trivial to the point of clicking once to join someone’s game. Given how complicated PC multiplayer can be, that’s amazing and deserves special mention. My only complaint is that the game doesn’t have any voice chat support, which is bizarre. Granted, you’ll probably be using Skype or Vent instead, but it’s odd that a game would ship without that functionality these days. For you to play the game you have to have internet connection at all time wich is kinda a downer so far. We will see what comes out in the next few patches.

GRAPHICS AND VISUAL EFFECTS:

Diablo III is Blizzard’s best-looking game yet, and Blizzard makes some gorgeous ass games. Astounding use of vibrant color make Diablo III look like a moving metal cover. The environments work with the background and foreground now, too. Enemies will now crawl up at you from below or jump down from above, which makes it feel less like you’re playing on a large sheet of paper.
My only problem with the game’s visuals is that the environments dip into familiar Diablo territory too often. Act 2 of the game takes place in a giant desert, which is extremely reminiscent of Diablo II’s Lut Gholein. Act 3 even opens in a snow-swept castle and sends you out onto a battleground filled with siege equipment, hearkening to Mount Arreat from Lord of Destruction. Granted, Diablo II came out 12 years ago, so I didn’t mind seeing these environments recreated in 3D, but I was hoping for more original settings. That said, the game is still gorgeous, so even though you’ll recognize these environments from past games, you’ll never get tired of looking at them. I am amazed how good it looks and to compare Diablo III to DIablo II it still feels like the old game we all played and loved for so long...NOT. Its completley diferent then the last game and is a whole new game for diablo fans to enjoy!

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS :

It’s been a long, long wait, but it was all worth it. With Diablo III, Blizzard made one of the most approachable and enjoyable games in the world even better. In fact, aside from the annoying online-only infrastructure, I can’t imagine a single thing I would change to make this game better. That’s when you know you have a classic on your hands, and that’s also when you know you should play this game as much as you can.

FAQ:
1. Does Diablo 3 still like Diablo 2?
Answer:
To me the answer so far is no, I grew up on diablo 2, and know there were a lot of interesting things added over time but the core game was brilliant, it forced the players to not only rely on the armor sets, or unique items for combat but to rely on skill and setting. It forced the player to plan how they were going to play the game long before the game was actually played. When you did finally get started and found the unique items or complete sets you checked to see if they built up your planned characters. The beauty of the game was that your character was not only following the footsteps of the game they were following the footsteps literally of malius and his foolish quest. The other things about the game that I like were that your characters only spoke breifly when entering dungeons or caverns for the first time, this single line of text did not say much but it helped to solidify the different versions of each hero, I also liked how the NPC’s treated each class differently, now granted I haven’t got to far but it seems like very few of the NPC’s treat your character with any individuality, for example in D2-act 1 gheed hated necromancers, and if I remember correctly Act 2 or 3 saw a few NPC’s that either reverred necromancers or treated them harshly but fairly point being that these subtle hints aided in establishing the acts and the overall world of Diablo 2.
That being said what seems to really be a step backwards from the days of diablo 2 is the way the interface has taken a major step backwards, example number one is the potions, in D2 you could equip different potions or scrolls to any one of the number slots and use them as needed,also the potions seemed to never provide the player with the instantaneous effect D3 has but instead they provided a massive increase in the regen rate of the effect fields. Running, what happened tin the world of diablo, did its people forget how to run, well it seems like it since the stamina bar has been removed completely in favor of the latency bar as well as shrunk down to almost nill. Spells and abillity mouse selection seems to have been streamlined into a small little section at the bottom where players get the basic MMO set up as to compared to D2 where you could set up your personal number interliers from 1-9 plus mouse keys and switch on a whim, now your restricted to the left, right and numbers 1-4 due to the next disgrace. The skill system.
In diablo 2, the players were given a wide variety of skills based on the player skill trees, in diablo 3 the skill trees have been vastly reduced and now skills level up with the players level as opposed to players choosing where to put skill points into. This limits the players interactivity with the game and seems like mistake on blizzards part. Not only are we no longer allowed to advance skills at our leisure we now have one of the most ingenious systems of D2 and its expansion removed and altered for D3, and that is the rune system. In D2 runes were used to create special words that made unique items, that if combined correctly the item would gain special benifits, this fell in line with the Gem/socket system brought about in D2. In D3 the player no longer has that abillity instead the player’s rune system has been altered to serve the skill tree now, and while this is a good idea to an extent it destroys one of the love parts of diablo 2:LOD since the player has lost their customization of items for game play purposes. I would have like to see the socket/gem/rune/jewel systems maintained while also exploring this route but blizzard felt that was not what they wanted, which is a shame because it would have built upon an already excellent system.
Final few things i’m going to say about this game, one its not a horrible game, but so far the difficulty levels seems very off compared to D2, but i’ll reserve judgement fully on that till I finish the game, and two the always online single player, there are times where one can understand the benefits to always online and there are times where it looks like someones trying to be greedy, in this case blizzard/activision tried to be greedy. First off for a company that boasts 12million WoW players how is it that at launch their servers cannot handle the capacity of about 4 millions players, especially given the preorder numbers and the open beta weekend but i digress, what bothers me the most and i’m sure that many agree, having the single player be online only causes several problems, 1 being the short term server failure paperweight game, 2 four sets of TOS agreements that basically tell gamers that blizzard reserves the right to shut down accounts for no reason in one and that users are entitled to their money back if they refuse the last one before playing the game(I counted its four 2 page TOS agreements, I payed 60 bucks for a game, not to have to go to a lawyers office),3) D3 is the only known game that has full lag in the single player campaign, I give ubisoft credit because at least their servers can handle the load of their popular titles… and last what precedent does this set for blizzard games, does this mean that for both starcraft and diablo fans who still play the old games when blizzard decides it can no longer afford the cost of servers to house 20 million players, 30 million players, 40 million players, given estimates based on WoW and decides to shut down the servers of older games that don’t charge monthly premiums?
Thats the concern this practice presetns, what happens when we are no longer allowed to graciously play the rented game we payed sixty bucks for.
At least I trust steam to hit the off switch , I don’t even think one was designed for blizzards new generation of games.

2. Is the game worth 60$
Answer:
YES! Absolutley worth even more the game is amazing and i think 60$ for this is a fair price given the fact that you get your Battle-net account witch feels so good in the hands of a Long-Time blizzard games player.

3. Is the game harder, or easyer than the last game?
Answer:
Yes, it is easyer than D2 becouse of the fact that you have more options on D3 than on D2. But it is still challenging and it is not easy. If you find the game not challenging enough, go Nightmare, Hell hey maybe even Inferno.

Thats it, i hope you liked it good luck playing the game and most of all, hawe fun!

AdSense Issues/update

2012-05-31T10:35:00.001-07:00

I seem to have some issues with google AdSense. Cant seem to get the ads on the blog. If u have experiance with AdSense post a comment with some helpful advice or a link on how to get it going. Will be posting some game opinion on Diablo 3, League of Legends, World of Warcraft and Starcraft 2. Oh and im saveing up money for a new computer so i`l get it in about a month or two so i can begin to post some gameplay footage of games listed above and opinion on gameplay ups and downs.

Hello world

2012-05-29T04:51:00.002-07:00

Hello people of the world, i am a 22 year old student living in Serbia and i just cant seem to pay the rent... I don`t have any family or job so i survive of 80$ a month. I feel like the internet is my only option of surviving the cruel world... In Serbia a normal salary is 300$. Its a very hard time for me, right now i feel like my life is slowly but shurely shutting down. :( Its a good thing i`ve been an exelent studentn in high school or else i don`t know what i would do. I`m also looking for someone to talk to about my problems, some one who can give me advice on how to feel better. Thanks guys i love you <3

Il be posting some threads about some books, games, movies, sites, TV shows, songs and people who i find interesting.

Love Marko