Das Blog

Thursday, November 20, 2014

League of Legends Preseason 5: Zyra Jungle

Let's talk about what happens when you put a plant in the jungle.

Zyra jungle has always been interesting. Her plants take damage differently from any other pet, based on number and nature of hits rather than having actual health. Because of this, jungle Zyra actually works best if you focus the little minions first, contrary to how some other junglers work.

Zyra wasn't a major jungle pick in season 4, but one of the changes for season 5 is making the jungle much tougher. Because of the unique way her plants work, I predicted that Zyra might not be hit so hard by these changes, and preliminary testing suggests that to be true. She still operates largely as well as she did in season 4. When everyone else is taking a hit and she isn't, jungle Zyra may become a thing.

One of the biggest changes of the preseason is that dragon a much bigger deal. He also has a new attack which is somewhat abusable. Certain champs, like Nidalee, Pantheon, and Fiora, can use either movement abilities or autoattack blocks to take down dragon solo at very low levels. Explaining my Zyra tactics to a friend, he asked if Zyra could take dragon at level 2. Lo,

(burning Flash isn't really necessary, but can be used to avoid river wards)

I'll be giving her a shot this preseason. Let me know if you find any other interesting picks for this new, untamed world!

Statistics and Reality: How They Interact is Weird

I just came across this picture:

(click here to enlarge)

(from here, in case you'd like to know.)

This is a great example of how funky statistics can be, because the answer actually depends on your point of reference and assumptions.

Paragons of Game Design 1: Dark Souls

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Commence a new series of blog entries: Paragons of Game Design.

In these posts, I'll be highlighting games that are examples of outstanding design and highlighting just why they are. First up on our list is one I've hinted before:

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Does Money Make You Mean?

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Modeling the Mind

In psychological science, there are different approaches, or perspectives, different people bring to the field. As a science, psychology is descriptive. A true scientist doesn't actually 'prove' anything, they use methodological rigor to seek a consistent result under a particular set of circumstances.

Truth is consistency.

These results then serve as evidence to theories. These theories are what most people think of when describing findings. 'Study shows that sleep is important to memorization.' Well, yes and no. The study showed that people scored higher on a test if they slept beforehand. We extrapolate from that that sleep is important to memorization. (Alternative extrapolations could include: sleep reduces stress, sleep deprivation impairs general functioning, etc. These possibilities are narrowed down by repeating testing the same hypothesis with different methods that control for alternative explanations.)

But then comes the question of how. And in attempts to explain multiple findings and multiple theories, psychologists develop models. Although few scientists will disagree with the raw data of a well-designed study, they may disagree on which model best accounts for results in the larger scheme. Models are statistically tested for goodness of fit, which helps lend some objective credence to them, but ultimately they are based on incomplete information. Most of these models are focused on a concept, and highly abstracted, such as the various models of memory. They look kinda like this. Here's a more detailed explanation of one you may be familiar with.