Going to be answering a couple hundred more questions

by   •   General
 

This post is over 12 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

About half a year ago, I answered a massive batch of questions on ask.fm upon request. I think it’s about time to answer a bunch more.

If you’re interested in having a question answered, feel free to leave it at:

http://ask.fm/Parkzer

Spam or things that are not questions will not be answered. There are also a small set of topics regarding which I do not discuss publicly. Other than that, I’ll try and get to and an­swer every question. The an­swers will hopefully be posted within the next week or two.

In other news, happy day-after-Christmas, and I hope you’re having a good holiday season.

 

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Regarding the Tetris Tournament Online III (TTO3) grand finals

by   •   Highlights, Tetris
 

This post is over 12 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Due to the overwhelming number of requests I have received to comment on the Tetris Tournament Online III grand finals broadcast, I felt like I could not ignore them any longer. I’ve given my opinion to a few different people in individual conversations, but like always, what I say always gets changed when passed along. So, I decided to post another official announcement again, this time regarding the results of the tournament.

For those who are completely unfamiliar with the Tetris Tournament Online, it is the world competitive Tetris championship tournament, sponsored by the Tetris Company, the copyright holders of the Tetris brand, and organized by Hard Drop, the largest Tetris community in the world (as of today).

One of the most frequent questions I got was why I didn’t stream or cast anything in the tournament. I already answered this to a decent level of thoroughness back on October 19, 2013. In case you missed it, you can read it here:

http://parkzer.com/2013/10/19/

The next most common question is how the tournament went. I managed to get the statistics for TTO3 from Twitch, Hard Drop’s primary streaming platform, and can give you a comparison to TTO2 from last year, which is the tournament where I hosted the stream and casted.

  • Unique visitors. This is the number of different people who saw at least some part of the broadcast. TTO2: 37,963. TTO3: 3,340 (8.8%).
  • Max concurrent viewers. This is the largest number of people who were watching the stream at the same time. TTO2: 2,049. TTO3: 604 (29.5%).
    • An interesting supplementary piece of information – after TTO2 was over, we did fan games. During this time, the max concurrent viewers was 624. This means that we had more people watching fan games last year than the tournament had overall during the main event this year.
  • Average minutes per visitor. This is how long, on average, people watched the stream once they arrived on the page. I’m not 100% sure how to interpret this correctly because they’re displayed as ranges on a per-hour basis, but these numbers are taken straight from the Twitch statistics. TTO2: 3-45 minutes. TTO3: 7-14 minutes (25.3%).

To put things simply, TTO3 was massively less popular than TTO2.

The next main question I received was why this happened. The cause of this is simple – the leadership behind the tournament this year was insufficient. Hard Drop was not prepared to host the tournament yet, but an unqualified individual took over the lead and pushed this tournament to release without proper preparation. The founder of Hard Drop did not stop this because all he was interested in was to get something happening in the community.

Finally, the last question is if I will ever be re-entering the Tetris scene to revive streaming and broad­casting with high-quality production value. Unfortunately, I have no answer to that at this point. The primary determining factor is if the Tetris Company will start making an effort to promote their brand again. If they make an effort to improve the official Tetris game (which at this point is Tetris Friends – they can either improve it or make a new one), and become more motivated to get people involved with Tetris, then yes, I may consider re-entry. If not, then I will not.

 

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Thought I was getting Magma Chamber, instead I got modded ARAM

by   •   League of Legends
 

This post is over 12 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Back in the All-Stars game of 2013, Riot let the viewers preview Magma Chamber, a new 1v1 and 2v2 map coming to League of Legends.

Magma Chamber

If you can’t tell from the image, Magma Chamber is a map designed to look like middle lane, but much smaller. There is only one turret (because once one turret is destroyed, the owner of that turret loses the game). The rest of the map (including all jungle camps) is also gone.

I was particularly interested and looking forward to the release of Magma Chamber because in 5v5 games on Summoner’s Rift, I always get set back by the enemy jungler. I can have complete, dominating con­trol over my lane, then the enemy jungler shows up and makes me instantly lose my lane. I play extremely aggressively, so I usually don’t get much help from my own jungler because I am pushed up so far.

In Magma Chamber, I wouldn’t have to worry about another random person interfering with my winning lane, so I felt like I would excel at it. Unfortunately, I found out today that the 1v1 and 2v2 map they released was not Magma Chamber, but instead a modified version of the all random all mid (ARAM) map.

The worst part about this map is that the lane resembles top lane, with two bushes placed inside the actual lane. I tried playing 1v1s on the map, and my only two losses so far have been when the enemy player bush juked me about 6 times in a row before I finally died to enemy minions. The worst part is that you can’t even buy wards on this map, so the only real counter play for bush juking is gone.

Overall, I’m extremely dissatisfied with this update. I think it’s literally so rushed and bad that Riot was better off just not releasing this update and delaying it some more. Some might claim that I’m being harsher than I should because I have a bias in favor for mid lane, seeing as I’m a mid laner and I ba­si­cal­ly got ripped off by top lane, but either way, this isn’t up to par with the quality I hope from League of Legends.

 

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Done with my first quarter of graduate school

by   •   General
 

This post is over 12 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

I submitted the last final exam essay for my history class today, which marks the end of my first quarter of graduate school. Classes resume again on January 6, 2014, so I have about three weeks of winter break.

For those who are curious, the topic of the essay was the reasoning behind the fall of the Democratic party in the 1960s.

There are a bunch of things that I’m looking to get done during these three weeks, and some of it involves online stuff. Specifically, I’d like to release at least two new videos – one vlog and one League of Legends stream highlight video – and maybe a third if I get time, including a bunch of unseen footage. I’d also like to stream a few times whenever I’m at a location where I have Internet good enough to stream.

So, if you’ve been eagerly awaiting some more of my personal content to be released, those are a few things that you can look forward to seeing within the next month or so.

 

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“Riley Rewind,” a web series by Ray William Johnson & Anna Akana

by   •   General
 

This post is over 12 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

If you’re a regular to my website, you know that I don’t regularly feature other people’s work on my website unless it’s of godlike-quality or has a close personal connection with me.

I decided to share with you today a new web series made by director Ray William Johnson and writer Anna Akana. Ray William Johnson is best known for his YouTube series “Equals 3,” where he comedically reviews viral videos. Earlier today, he released Riley Rewind, a series of five videos following the life of Riley, a girl able to rewind time.

The videos are available at https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=vb.190558433385.

Be sure to watch the one at the bottom first, because that is Act I of V.

Normally time travel is a pretty difficult concept to work with because the creativity that comes out of it can be limiting, and easily turns things into a science-fiction story. However, I thought the way it was integrated into Riley Rewind maintained as much realism as possible.

This is one of the best web series I’ve seen, tied up there with Freddie Wong’s Video Game High School. If you’ve got some free time, I highly recommend that you watch it – it left me satisfied and wanting more at the end.

Update: the videos are now also available on YouTube; I have embedded the playlist below.

 

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Illogical databases and first shovelable snowfall

by   •   General
 

This post is over 12 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

I have a paper due in a little bit (before today ends), so what better thing is there to do than post to my blog, right?

I’m taking procrastination to the next level by coming to my blog to rant about the annoying things in life instead of reviewing my paper and finalizing it for submission. It’s due at midnight tonight, so I still have about an hour left.

One of the reasons writing my paper took longer than expected is because my library’s research database kept trolling me. It acted as if it contained some top-security clearance-required material and kept logging me out every ten minutes or so. If I got to add my username and password to my paper once for every time I had to log in again, my paper would probably be a page longer than it is now.

In case you’re curious, my paper is about the effects of video gaming on adolescent social development.

In other news, I tend to have a chain of procrastination, where higher degrees of procrastination become beneficial to me because I end up finishing things that I procrastinated on earlier. For example, if I did not have a paper due today, I probably would not have shoveled snow off the driveway. But, because I was procrastinating on writing a paper, I ended up shoveling the driveway.

It’s a great way to get sort-of-procrastination-worthy things done. You should try it sometime.

On a related note, as implied by me shoveling snow off the driveway, we recently got our first shovelable snowfall of the season.

Which is awful.

Because I hate snow.

Now that I’ve consumed enough time doing other less-important things, I’m going to go back to revising and submitting my paper. Only one more to go after this one, due at the end of the week, then I’m done with my first quarter of graduate school.

 

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