League of Legends: New ranked leagues system on PBE

by   •   League of Legends
 

This post is over 13 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.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’ve been keeping up with the League of Legends patch notes for the public beta environment, you might already know that there is going to be a new leagues system for competitive ranked play on League of Legends. It’s currently being tested out, and will eventually go onto the live servers in some form of what the testing version is like now.

The basic premise of the league system is that you’re placed into a league, and you compete to earn points in order to get promoted and demoted from divisions inside the leagues. If you do extremely well, you can also get promoted to the next league.

The main idea of doing this was to get rid of the elo system – basically, Riot Games didn’t want each individual person to have a numerical value assigned to them that signifies their skill level. They also wanted to make the scale of competition more local – instead of being on a massive ladder of hundreds of thousands of people, you are now competing against a handful of other people who have been placed into your division.

My initial opinion about this is that, although it might be pretty on the outside, it seems to be the same as before on the inside. It doesn’t seem like matchmaking will prioritize you with people in your own divi­sion (and if it did, it would get pretty frustrating because you would be playing with and against the same people over and over). The number of points you earn to move on to the next league seem to still be global.

Going back to matchmaking, it most likely will completely ignore what league or division you’re in, because it will still use a hidden elo (or MMR, which stands for match making rating), just like normal games do. So, if you seem to be a very unlucky silver league player who always fails your promotion series, you might have a high-enough hidden elo that you’re queued with gold and platinum league players, but still never manage to get out of silver league.

Of course, I had to try this out, and as we all know, the people on PBE are complete trolls (or are just plain stupid or bad). I streamed my experience to share with everyone.

Out of the first three games I played, two of those games I had to carry so hard that if something like this happened on the normal server, you would be considered some sort of god. The first game I played Kassadin and went 33/10/13 (the tenth death being an execution to a super minion), and the third game I played Miss Fortune and went 29/9/11.

I ended up placing into Silver Division I (which was named Zyra’s Infiltrators for me).

If you’re also interested in trying out the new leagues system, you can head on over to the public beta server (and prepare to carry as hard as I did if you want to win). If you want to watch the replays of my stream, they can be found on Twitch.TV at http://twitch.tv/parkzer/b/359268549 for the first part and http://twitch.tv/parkzer/b/359328617 for the second.

 

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In case you’re curious: uptime statistics for 2012

by   •   Site News
 

This post is over 13 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 got an email report a few days ago from a service I use that tracks my website’s uptime.

Uptime, of course, is the time that my website is up – basically, any time that my website is not down due to some sort of server error. A few years ago, web hosting services emphasized how they have 99.9% uptime rates, but nowadays, it’s not that huge of a deal because near-100% uptime is pretty much expected out of all hosts now.

Either way, I thought the stats were interesting, and decided to post mine here for 2012 for those who were curious.

Yearly uptime: 99.92% Downtime: 5 hour(s) 48 min(s)

Month 2012-12 Uptime: 100.00%
Month 2012-11 Uptime: 100.00% Downtime: 46 sec(s)
Month 2012-10 Uptime: 99.66% Downtime: 2 hour(s) 9 min(s)
Month 2012-09 Uptime: 99.98% Downtime: 5 min(s) 35 sec(s)
Month 2012-08 Uptime: 100.00%
Month 2012-07 Uptime: 99.84% Downtime: 1 hour(s) 2 min(s)
Month 2012-06 Uptime: 99.99% Downtime: 5 min(s) 39 sec(s)
Month 2012-05 Uptime: 99.91% Downtime: 33 min(s) 29 sec(s)
Month 2012-04 Uptime: 99.90% Downtime: 37 min(s) 4 sec(s)
Month 2012-03 Uptime: 100.00%
Month 2012-02 Uptime: 100.00%
Month 2012-01 Uptime: 99.81% Downtime: 1 hour(s) 13 min(s)

Seems like October was my worst month.

Two hours and 9 minutes out of 31 days? That’s pretty rough.

 

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Why is my shower leaking and not draining

by   •   General
 

This post is over 13 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.
 

Do you know what’s not cool? Having the ceiling about your shower leak.

Do you know what’s even more not cool? Not having any of the leaking water drain out.

Yes, that is how I found my shower when I woke up this morning.

Fortunately, our maintenance staff was available when I woke up, and they came in to get everything cleaned up and started working on the leak above my shower. In order to do that, they completely tore out the entire ceiling above my shower to get access to the pipes.

Meanwhile, they let me use a spare, vacant room to shower so I wouldn’t have to go to work in the morning all smelly and unshowered.

 

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The governer cares, I swear!

by   •   General
 

This post is over 13 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.
 

While I was in one of my university’s buildings today, I noticed a phone sitting on a desk near the elevator. Curious, I walked towards it.

I saw that the phone was unplugged, and that there was a sign posted on the wall right behind the phone.

In case you can’t see it in the image, the sign said, “Emergency complaint line to the governor’s office. The governor cares about your opinion!”

The governor’s office cares enough to put a phone here, but not quite enough to plug it in…

 

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I’m back in Madison

by   •   General
 

This post is over 13 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.
 

My winter break has come to an end, and I am now back in Madison in my apartment on my university campus.

Like usual, classes don’t start for me until a week later, but I came here early to begin working. Also, like usual, my working hours are extremely flexible, so I’ll be able to stream a lot more than I did over break – which brings me to my next point.

A lot of people have been wondering why I haven’t been streaming much over break. Those who have known me for a while probably know the reason for this, but the newcomers probably don’t. The issue I have is that, back in my home town at my parents’ house, where I go over breaks, the Internet is about as slow as modern-day Internet can get without still using a dial-up connection. I already have trouble watching high-definition video, so I’m pretty sure that you can already conclude that it’ll be near impossible to stream high-definition video, or any video that’s watchable.

Occasionally over break, I might still stream – this is when I’m either at one of my friends’ homes who has better Internet, or I’m streaming something low-quality (like Pokémon) that doesn’t require high-definition.

If you’re not familiar with my stream, you can check it out at Twitch.TV/Parkzer. If you’re interested, you can follow me to be notified whenever I go live (which will be very frequently within the next week or so) and watch me play some League of Legends.

 

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How I’ve been spending my new year so far

by   •   General
 

This post is over 13 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’ve been asked how my new year has been going so far.

Unfortunately, the answer to that is “not so great.”

Since the night before January 1, I’ve been feeling pretty sick. My illness spiked during the day of January 1 and 2, where I was so sick that I was literally lying in bed all day drinking orange juice and watching YouTube videos and Twitch streams. I slowly started getting better on the 3rd, and today I was finally okay enough to get out of the house for the first time in the new year.

This was probably the most sick I’ve ever been in about 5-6 years of my life. The only time I can remember being this sick is during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school when I was taking driver’s education.

Summer driver’s ed has a stipulation where, because it’s so short and the days are so long, you can only have one absence, or else you fail the course. Of course, they’re obviously not going to fail someone for actually being really sick for more than a day, but they set that as a rule so people wouldn’t be lazy and miss class when they’re only a little sick.

During a day of driver’s ed, I was so dizzy in the morning that I wasn’t able to balance, and I ended up missing a day. Apparently, the empty threat of failing driver’s ed if I was sick for any longer helped me recover in a single day.

On my first day out on the new year, I went to Chick-fil-A with Ed Lam for the first time. We were planning on going to Buffalo Wild Wings today with Ben Chow (as I mentioned a few days ago), but he ended up rescheduling because he had “family responsibilities” to which he needed to tend.

Ed and I went into Chick-fil-A and ended up getting take-out because there were so many people eating in, and we pretty much didn’t even have space to eat inside the restaurant.

After getting back to his house, we played a bit of League of Legends, then I left and went to visit my martial arts academy, which I hadn’t been able to do for the past two days because of my illness.

Again, I got a bunch of footage from today that will be in a compilation video coming out in the near future.

 

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