Got in a few more games with Taric yesterday.  Managed to get an S+ on him in 1 game.  That game I had an adc that understood his kit.  Immediately after that I had a draven that decidedly did not understand his kit - guy might was well have been throwing feathers instead of axes.  

Anyway, then I hooked up w/ some buds.  Played 1 game with PDT, hunny, and bryff.  PDT wasn't on board with voice chat and was kind of in his afk doing stuff world, so we gave him the boot after a game.  Hunny was leaning heavy towards tilt, so was probably the best move.  Anyway, Bryff ended up supporting me and did a really great job in that game, but we lost due to some shenanigans.  The next game I was just smeh.  My support forced me to blow my heal within the 1st 2 minutes for no good reason and then I did not play well enough to compensate.  I could have done so much better but played like poop lord.  I was a little tilt leaning, but nothing too bad. I really need to refocus on that whole "i'm choosing to play in this elo" thing.  Me expecting anything good out of my support was not good.  I needed to be better.  

So, most of us noticed a big decrease in key drop rate.  I did some digging and found out what's going on:

"Key drop rates are NOT linear and only wins have a chance of dropping a key. So you will earn key fragments much faster in your earlier wins than you will in your later wins. Or said another way, each incremental key fragment drop is harder than the last (on average... there is variance). This resets on a monthly basis for each player individually. 

The goal is to create a nice ebb and flow. 

Grade does NOT impact key drop chance. 

Premades DO increase drop chance. 

Chests earned has no impact on key drop chance. "

Also, prelim champ win rate stats this patch

Best champions

1.  Soraka	54.0%
2.  Kayle	53.7%
3.  Kindred	53.4%
4.  Ahri	53.1%
5.  Volibear	53.0%

jeeze o pete I was getting so salty last night.  We got in a few games with that new fella I mentioned a few days back... unfortunately, every single game of late that he's with us, someone in our group ends up tilting and stopping world hunger.  Didn't really enjoy my games all that much yesterday.  Was just kind of a low elo feed fest.  One game was nice in which we ended up stomping a team that sent their mid bot to gank like 8 times.  Always feels good to do well enough with that much pressure.  But bleh - I was not enjoying things.  And I feel bad as I want the new fella to get to plat and us to get some games in.  Played 1 game on my main and that was rough.  Should not have done that...

Anyway, hoping to refocus tonight and have some fun.  Way too tilted over crap last night.  

Holy toxic night, batman (aka the captain planet/batman, Christmas special).  Poor swan and boaz got an earful of awful yesterday.  Sorry, guys.   I've really got to get a better handle on things there.  I'll work at that and help hunny stay in line as well in the near future anyway.  He and I can tear into each other and then be all good the next game, but people getting hit with shrapnel blows.  That's another advantage to playing with less folks on the regular though - bad night impact fewer.  Sorry all the same though!  That's shit.

Well, finally, after 1 year, I'm changing back to my previous ISP.  I'm hoping that means I'm set the LoL ping (its 30 or so every game now, so hopefully not an unfavorable jump on the swap).  Anyway, that puts me back on the beast mode upload speed, so I'll be able to stream again if I ever care to (while now I can't do crap... not really a fan of at&t uverse).  It also means I'll probably be back making vids from time to time.  Think its been a long time since I've bothered with any of that crap either.  hat's happening next week anyway.

I had a really enjoyable first game of the night on my main.  Played support morg and we crushed it so hard the enemy adc RQ at like 8 min in.  We had a 12 min victory.  Had a few enjoyable games with swan and then things descended into poop town toxic sludgeville for a bit.  Finished the last game of the night popping off and having a really fun win, though. 

Having some mixed thoughts re: PDT.  And all that goes back to the whole do I enjoy playing w/ folks and they with me, etc.  If not, then why bother.  Anyway, on the con side, the guy won't join or rarely joins voice chat do to whatever crazy setup he as going on.  I'm down with not using voice chat if folks communicate well in game, they want to abstain because they are tilted, can't talk now, etc., but generally prefer voice chat.  I get that maybe 5% of the time w/ PDT.  ffs 90% of the draw is him talking... idk... there's having to play around someone due to this and this and it just feels really constrained.  The whole 1TP thing/linear style.  Put it all together and its a recipe for tilt atm, so I'm taking a short break.

It recently occurred to me that I should start a team of folks that are all 1TPs.  My goal is to have to forfeit in champ select.   I think I was a little slow on the uptake initially w/ one of our newer pals.  Did not realize we were adding a 3rd 1TP.  Kind of funny anyway. Just something to keep in mind if you play with our pal beetle - guy can play poppy and skarner top - jungles if needed - gold lv player that is very hungry for plat.

Anyway, I think I should pull back the curtain a little bit on some things that I haven't discussed publicly as there were/are some bad feelings there.  Hopefully, I can help sort that out. So, a lot of this has its root in some discussions I had with thunder a little while back... I think I'll go way far back and move us through to today to hopefully clear many things up.  

So, as you know, quite a few of us used to shoot the shite on this blog/forum.  Eventually that devolved in many ways to just folks trying to troll/get a rise out of each other.  Some of that was on me, quite a bit was on a few others.  I think I subtlety and occasionally very directly made it clear that I'd rather not be doing that sort of thing here.  Personally, I'd rather have a conversation with myself than have folks randomly pop in to try to egg me on.  Or have the same old tired discussions here and there.  As such, this blog has reverted more to a commentary about what I'm up to, etc, and its just something I enjoy posting to and taking stock of things.  Folks are still welcome to jibber jabber as they like, but days of folks just tuning in for some trollish drama are hopefully in the rear view mirror.  

So, let's move forward a bit.  Thunder and I have a bit of a falling out.  The long and the short of that whole falling out is that I caused that guy more than a little agita.  It kind of got to the point where, while being a real nice guy, he ended up festering quite a few negative feelings towards me that were... I guess a little troublesome is an ok way to put it.  Now, I can, quite easily explain how he got to where he was with me and I understand that.  All said and done, though, I really got under his skin and I don't think it was a healthy thing for him or me.  Anyway, I don't have any ill will towards him nor do I fault him in any way for how he felt, etc.  We had some behind the scenes discussion about all this stuff.

All of this ties heavily into the way I'm viewing the game, things I'm doing, and some of my posts.  And if you can read between the lines, a lot of it is related to me focusing on self improvement, figuring out how to not be toxic, etc.

So, now to address a few things:

1. Why am I'm not using team speak anymore?  I think its better to have more of a clean break from thunder.  I'd really rather not create anything more uncomfortable for him or me, so I thought it was best to find another option.  This also avoids some awkwardness. Anyway, I landed on using curse voice - which I was glad to learn actually has a decent web client now, so you can just click a link and join a call without downloading the app.
2. Why am I not playing with X person?  This ones a little more tricky to address without going into a case by case basis, but I can start with a simple question?  What causes me to be toxic and/or go on tilt and how can I avoid that?  Then going further, do I play with folks that trigger that behavior on a very frequent basis?  For instance, the other day I was commenting and "thinking aloud" about my current thoughts on PDT - all as it related to me tilting.  Is it healthy or smart for me to play with certain individuals or they with me?  My thought is no, its not.  So, taking breaks is smart.  
3. Clubs are silly - membership does not impact my view of folks.  Don't know that I ever brought this up - just tossing in out.  

One big take away from that 2nd point - I'm not trying to be mean or malicious to folks.  I actually genuinely like everyone I play with or have played with on a regular basis. But I think its smart to take a break from certain folks and I really don't want folks to think I'm not tossing out invites because of some ill will towards them.  If I think there's really good odds that playing with X person will set me off or if I'm already wound up, then I'll either play with folks that don't mind that sort of thing or just play PUGs solo.  None of that is intended as a screw you to folks.  I think moderation is best in some instances - not just for me, but for some folks that I play with and if we trigger each other.   I'm paying a lot of attention to certain behaviors that i have around certain folks and thinking through why - then evaluating if I should go into moderation, what i should address with x person, and so on.  

Anyway, hope this clears a few things up.

This sort of confuses me because it seems like you're throwing shit while upset about people (previously?) throwing shit. So that's awk.

Anyway, i haven't played with you - or anyone really - in months so i don't really have much to add there, and you have been pretty open about trying to improve + apologizing when you do screw up (which we all do). So that's sort of all i have to say on that matter at least.

What i will talk about is a little bit less focused on LoL, but hopefully it is somewhat interesting since i rarely see/talk to y'all...

---

So what have i been up to? Still a lot of IRL stuff - but, that said, i still do play games sometimes Hearthstone and Duelyst are probably my easiest casual games since i can now play HS on my new not-totally-shitty phone when i'm on the bus commuting. Duelyst is fun and interesting even though the reset *huge* changes to the draw mechanic pretty wildly shook up the game and made it have a lot less "flow", though it's probably healthy in the long run and certainly dropped the consistency of all the combo decks out there.

Has anyone played Faerie? That one looks interesting in the future, though i'm not sure about paying $7 "entrance fee". Hoping it'll go Open Access soon and that'll be great.

Regarding PC games, i've been pretty heavily into Ashes of the Singularity. i actually hit top #14 about 10 days into release, despite not playing the Beta at all and not having played any RTS's since like, Dawn of War II - which is more of a "Real Time Tactical" than a true RTS - plus a healthy amount Sins of a Solar Empire while drunk with friends, and way long time ago Rise of Legends before that, which i was *awful* at.

i know pacov owns Ashes and psychotic plays it, but curious if any one else here plays let me know and maybe we can play some 2v2 games. i certainly need to work on some of my new build orders since i've been playing less :C and i need to a sparring partner to play against/with Avatar rush.

Rito servers having problems tonight it seems... :/

Glad you checked in hedgie - still working for same place since Amazon?  I haven't really gotten into ashes as of yet - might not ever.  Kind of fun, but hasn't really hooked me.  re; the card games, nopers - i know a few the other folks do still.  Used to love SOASE for games with pals... been a long time since I've played that one.  

edit - playing on LAN while the server issues get sorted.  Looks like they have a fix now, but need to deploy + login queue fun.

i actually left CreateSpace a while ago - 2010 i think. i rotated to a Solar Engineer company that promptly went out of business because of the Solyndra fiasco

From there i pivoted to a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin that did logistics planning software for the Marines. Was really interesting idea, and i had some interesting projects + self-managed work. But was not great pay \:

Now i work for a social-media sentiment-analysis company. Lots of machine-learning stuff. This is what drove me to pursue my Masters so right now i'm doing grad classes ~10 hours a week + working + working on thesis. On a more personal level, i got married and such, so that can be time consuming as well - a good kind - but still time consuming.

All of that leads to not having a lot of solo-game time (and i actually play a lot of board games now...), and when i do have time to play i generally want something i can play in shorter batches/leave anytime/generally less stressful. i still enjoy LoL and still wish i could play it but . . . it's pretty punishing when you only get to play 5-6 games a month at most since the items/champs/meta are rotating in and out so frequently it feels like.

That's great re: getting married. Grats!  

I have also been kinda busy....

I quit my engineering job a while back. Started working on making my own video game (its a simple text based horror/adventure). Want to build up my resume for applying to more coding related jobs/video game jobs. Swan has been a bro helping me edit my writing. Surprise! My comma use is equivalent to that of a 3rd grader. I might try to get it greenlit on steam or make a website for it. Not sure which avenue to take for publishing it. I wont be done for months with it but its been a learning experience.

I recently beat Super Ghouls and Ghosts with a couple of friends of mine. Grabbed the new Star Fox game for the Wii U pretty disappointed with the controls. 

graduate school stuff going on. Didn't get in where I wanted. Wait listed places didn't work out. Sorta bummed but still some possibilities out there. Got an email from my old professor about a school looking for applicants yet. Might shoot them off an application. Got in another place but they don't have there funds secured for fall yet so they can't give me an accurate idea of what I would receive. Not really thrilled about accepting something that I don't know if I will be getting money from. 

Teaching my girlfriend how to drive. 

Lots of fun stuff.

Hedgie: Congrats on the marriage! 

Cow - do you do any coding?  Didn't know you did any programming. So are you unemployed now?  I generally think its smart to have a another job lined up before you quit something, so hopefully you socked away some savings for a bit.  Anyway, hope all is well there.  

That's cool you've got a bit of a passion project going w/ the text game.  Sounds like you are enjoying the experiment at the least and hopefully you'll have something really cool to show for it when its done.  

@hedige - yeah I totally get the feeling of punishment if you can only play like 5-6 game a lol a month.  Barely enough time to keep up with things, grasp the change notes, etc.  Bleh.  Glad you are having fun doing other things though.

When I was an undergraduate in Physics I did a bit of coding for solving problems/taking data but never anything super big or impressive. I know how to think in code but have never really tried to make a nice big program. I am unemployed but sitting on a pile of money. The plan was to experiment with coding this summer and go to graduate school this fall. As of today I got accepted to Michigan Tech University. I thought they had counted me out from our email correspondence. So I was very surprised when I received a TA, tuition waiver and a stipend in the acceptance letter.

So we have a happy Cow right now

Well great!

Holy crap did this shite tilt me a bit in a low elo game.  To start, we knew the eve was coming and pinged it out in advance.  The spell combo rotation really made my head explode from thresh tho.  

http://plays.tv/video/57243c98b965c10441/zero-spell-thresh?from=user

God bless

https://www.livecap.tv/t/loltyler1/uaAKR74dFJ2