DOTA 2- down the fucking rabbit hole (again)

there was a time when I was blissfully unaware of what this means.
there was a time when I was blissfully unaware of what this meant.

I got into the beta of DOTA2 awhile back and after installing my only experience with it was waiting for a match to start and then quitting after about 2 minutes.  Given that I played the early versions of DOTA as part of my (and everyone else’s) Warcraft 3 addiction, I didn’t think I was missing much.  How good could it be? It’s a bunch of WC3 heroes fighting each other on the same map over and over and over again and I’d done that before.  Plus,  I remember it being pretty boring compared to a straight up WC3 match– you do only control one hero after all.

However, I’m eating a bit of crow meat now–I’ve played some handful of matches here and there and am largely hooked– every time I win one of those boxes, I buy a 2$ key (the game was free after all so I feel I owe them something!).  So my few and dear readers, I will likely post a terrible amount of DOTA stuff in the next gaggle of months until the addiction passes.  The realization that I liked it hit me last night when I actually called it the Cosmic Encounter (the best board game ever made) of video games– in that the basic premise is very simple and easily understood, but the sheer asymmetry of the number of heroes turns it into something completely different every single time.  What’s more, even if you suck really bad, you can still contribute to your team if you have a basic understanding.  Going into a server assuming you will be THE carry in the game is setting yourself up for disaster, but pushing lanes, support and ganking are doable with just a bit of practice.

Please note the most popular video game on the planet is effectively a DOTA clone (League of Legends) so the addictive qualities speak for themselves.

Reader falls from the Googlecunt

Google Reader will be cancelled in July.  This is a service that I use daily and there isn’t a good replacement (yet).  This got me thinking about the whole free-software as a service model we seem to have swallowed as a culture.  Web based emails is email is email, an online drive is meh, web-based calendars are just annoying (because you have multiple-on your phone, on your wall, on your computer, on your cloud based service) and maps? Well that’s pretty essential– but they don’t really need to show me where I am at– I KNOW that so it’s not something worth individualizing.  Sharing? Please– who gives a shit? Given that all these web-based tools are free because they monetize their userbase it’s quite nice for us users who would normally have to pay for such services— however the free model means that the owning company can simply shut down any service it doesn’t like without any contractual issues with it’s clients.  So giving free means taking away whenever and however.

That said, do we really want to use free software ever?  Is the concept of free software (where WE as users are the actual product for the people that really pay Google and the like for our information) something that we should all examine a lot more closely?

Frankly I would rather have paid or have a monthly payment for my feed reader and will do so in the future, ideally for an application where I can choose to update or not– but we were all cajoled into thinking free is a good idea back in 2006 or so– that cajoling that free is good is, in fact, Google’s business model.  We give you, our product (which is the users,) something for free and we monetize your use and interest in that product.  Now instead of paying for a hard drive, you can get one for free online where you can store your stuff. Your mail communications are all online as well.  What will happen when Google decided to get rid of Drive and Google Plus–or even MAIL? More likely these will eventually change to such a degree to make them unusable for the original adopters   Just like Reader and Google Wave, they have zero obligation to you as a user to keep that service running since it’s free and also not a free application (it’s a software as a service).  So if said piece of software isn’t a service that generates revenue for their actual customers, it will eventually be cut away to cut costs for services that do.

The main issue is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. have actual products that they sell to clients, but it’s not something ANY of us would want to buy for the most part; yet we are the ones that actually generate this revenue for these service providing companies, whether it’s by our searching or using free services or allowing a company to monetize our personal connections.  We are their product.  The bottom line is, if you use a free service, assume that it will either be changed or go away at the whim of the provider, i.e.: it CANNOT BE RELIED UPON.

Some Total War stuff

Looking at the Rome Total War 2 videos (battle of Teutoburg Forest here):

Other than pissing myself with glee after, during and before watching the above video, I sparked up Rome Total War: Barbarian Invasion this weekend and just had to record it and make inane commentary. If you haven’t played the series, RTW 2 is likely to be the best there is.

The awesome aspect of the Barbarian Invasion expansion is the concept of Hordes. When a faction is bereaved of it’s last city it turns into a horde– a mass of 5-6 army groups filled with the basic troops of that faction and a few other units sprinkled in. This represents the people themselves fleeing en masse from their fallen city. The faction then either has to take and settle an enemy city (and everyone is an enemy at this point) or dwindle away to nothing via attrition. These Hordes pop up constantly during the game and thus you never know when a massive beast of an army will wander over the horizon and into your carefully crafted territories. If you play as a western European faction, you will see fewer of these but they will have greater effect because the factions their are right on top of each other. Playing in the East, where cities are far more spread out, Hordes are everywhere mostly due to the Huns destroying city after city and sending waves of Vandals, Samartians and Roxolani into western Europe. What all this adds up to is an extremely dynamic campaign situation, one where you are not simply grinding down the nearest factions– you have to keep an eye on all of Europe to safeguard against the destruction one of these hordes can cause– whether it’s on your nearest enemy or on your faction.