League of Legends: A look from the past

Hi humans.

I’m currently in the process of browsing through my old website files and cleaning them out as I finalize my server transfer (about which I will explain more soon).

While doing that, I found this ancient screenshot I took of League of Legends from over a year ago – the web server’s date stamp shows it is from April 2012.

(Click to enlarge)

So for everyone who has joined League of Legends more recently, that’s what Summoner’s Rift used to look like.

 

TERA: Where I stand now

Hi humans.

It’s been almost four months since I first signed up for and started playing Tera. In those four months, I’ve made a significant amount of progress in the game, and made my way to the tier of high-level players, both in terms of gear/equipment and player ability. Up to this point, I can say that I had a good amount of fun playing Tera.

Unfortunately, things have changed recently. Now that I have reached the end-most of the end-game content, it seems like I’m at a standstill until I overcome obstacles that are partially out of my control.

The biggest problem that I have now is that all of the upper-level instances require a group to complete. I can still do lower-level instances by myself and single-handedly carry, but in order to get the rewards/drops to scale with where I am at the game, I need to challenge the hardest content in the game. Unfortunately, this means that I need to have a good team with synergy, and cannot carry just by myself.

This brings two huge problems. First, finding a group in itself is a challenge. Because I am a DPS (which is short for damage per second, a nickname for an offensive class), it takes an extremely long time for me to find a group using instance matching, as there are a plentiful of offensive class players when there is a scarcity of tanks and healers. As a result, when I want to find a dungeon group, I have to wait for at least 10-20 minutes, and sometimes even over half an hour. That is usually significantly longer than the time it takes to even finish the dungeon.

A traumatizing relevant story: once I waited over 40 minutes in queue and still didn’t get anything. For literally two minutes, I walked away to take care of something else. When I came back, I noticed that I was no longer in instance matching queue. I looked at my chat logs and realized that, within the two minutes I was gone (which was 5% of the time I had waited overall), I had found a group, then my group kicked me for being AFK. Even though, at the core, that was my fault, I think I ragequit Tera for a few days after that happened.

Branching off the instance matching time problem, the next huge problem is the skill level of other people. For some reason, a ton of people who play Tera are led to believe that they are a lot better at the game than they really are. I see people queueing up for upper-level dungeons who barely meet the gear requirement, have no idea what they’re doing, are not mechanically solid with their character, and end up just dying over ten times at the first boss.

Continue reading

 

UW-Madison 2013 graduation commencement ceremony

Hi humans.

After another two-hour-long dizzying ride back to Madison, I participated in my bachelor’s graduation commencement ceremony back at my university.

It obviously wasn’t the best experience, because it was two hours of listening to people speak and read off graduates’ names, and the fact that the Internet inside the stadium barely worked made the whole situation worse. Either way, it’s finally over now.

My dad took a bunch of photos of the event, but in a majority of them, you can’t see what’s going on because they’re so blurry. Out of the 40 or so photos that my dad took, I picked out five photos in which you could actually see the content of the picture.

The first two are of the Kohl Center, the building in which the ceremony took place.

Ignore the blurry black thing at the bottom-left corner of the photo above – my dad accidentally included the camera’s cord in the picture.

The next photo is of the screen above the ceremony area. The Kohl Center is usually a basketball stadium, which is why this was there. During the ceremony, it was used to give a close-up of the speakers and graduates, as well as closed captioning for the hearing impaired.

The last two photos are of the ceremonial area before commencement began.

All the other photos my dad took of me are too blurry because they were seated so far away. There were, however, professional photographers taking pictures of all the graduates, so once those get processed, I’ll be able to keep those as a souvenir of the ceremony, and possibly post them up here if they’re not too awful.

 

They should rename Picture Day to Waiting Day

Hi humans.

As I mentioned yesterday, I went to the Deerfield location of Chicago Martial Arts for photos. We had so many people there to get photos that my instructor might as well have told me it was Waiting Day, and not Picture Day.

But of course, that wasn’t that huge of a deal, because that meant I got more time to spend with Kyra, the academy’s mascot.

Kyra had to be locked in the main office a majority of the time so she wouldn’t interfere with the photographer’s work, so I stayed in the office a majority of the time with her so she wouldn’t get too lonely. I do, however, regret not bringing my laptop, because I got pretty bored in there.

After finally getting our photos done (and being gently forced to do some poses and kicks for individual photos, which consequentially led me to overextending my leg muscle as a result of not stretching enough prior to the shoot), we bought way too much fried chicken on the way back, and had dinner back at the Mundelein location while playing League of Legends.

 

Back to my home town

Hi humans.

After a dizzying two-hour car ride from Madison, I am finally back in my home town in the Chicago suburbs.

Because our family business was left unattended during the time my parents came to pick me up, we had to go straight there to make sure nobody set off firecrackers inside and burnt a hole through our ceiling (fortunately, nobody did).

That also meant that I was easily able to go to my martial arts academy (because, for those of you who don’t know, it is next door to our family business). After playing a game of League of Legends with Simon, my instructor, we went out to the main gym area as classes began, to teach.

Tomorrow, I’ll be headed to our alternate academy location for martial arts photographs – this also means that I will have new photos of Kyra, our mascot.

 

My second-to-last semester of undergraduate studies is over

Hi humans.

As of today, I am officially done with the second-to-last semester of undergraduate studies, and the last normal semester (seeing as my overall last semester is going to be this coming summer, during which I will be doing an internship for course credit).

I finished my last final exam earlier today for my criminology course, and now all I have to do is wait for all my exams to be graded and the scores compiled, calculated, and entered into my transcript.

As you can probably guess, this is also why I haven’t really been updating my website much lately or streaming at all – I’ve been studying for my last stretch of final exams.

As of right now, my plan is to spend tomorrow in Madison taking care of final move-out stuff (such as returning office keys to my various workplaces, packing up, and cleaning). My parents plan on coming to pick me up Friday early afternoon, and I’ll be headed back home for the weekend until Sunday, which is when we’ll be coming back for my graduation commencement ceremony.

I will also be taking this time to catch up on a lot of website maintenance stuff I’ve been falling behind on, as well as preparing to produce more content. Like usual, I’m not able to stream from home be­cause of the poor Internet connection, but I do have access to a better Internet connection at a different location during different parts of the day, so this doesn’t mean that I will never be streaming again in the future.

Stay tuned in the next few days as I get more information and am able to provide more updates.

 

Video: [LoL] Best gank NA, brought to you by Jayce

Hi humans.

This Jayce thought he was sneaky when he came to gank my lane after I had killed the enemy mid laner.

What he didn’t realize was that I was running ability power masteries, started a Doran’s Ring, and was maxing my Q first.

After he got chunked down really hard by my Hungering Strike, he promptly used his To the Skies on a minion to create distance, and even Ghosted away.

It’s almost as if I had ganked Jayce without even leaving my own lane.

(Click on the image to view the video)

(Linked image not working? Try this direct URL. http://www.twitch.tv/parkzer/c/2236314)

We’ve all heard the saying – wards save lives … or help you take lives of others.

 

Video: [LoL] How to save a Thresh

Hi humans.

Today’s highlight clip of the day is from a stream session during which I was leveling up an alternate account to level 30.

Although it’s nothing actually amazing, because I was playing Kayle and her champion was essentially designed to save people from death, I still thought it was funny that Thresh survived for this long in the first place, then I barely reached him in time to secure his getaway.

(Click on the image to view the video)

(Linked image not working? Try the direct URL. http://www.twitch.tv/parkzer/c/2219333)