The Importance of Report Transparency

A while ago when talking about a more powerful report feature for WoW, I mostly was referring to many specific categories to better match what the Terms of Use covered in addition to adapting to the evolving landscape of online interactions. By doing so, players can better police each other without a need for constant moderation. As time went on, I went further by asking for feedback to be shown about the effectiveness of a player's reports. This is a feature that I initially found in League of Legends but is also featured in other games nowadays. However, I didn't really explain why this sort of transparency is so important, so in this brief article I will provide some reasons as to why having this feedback is helpful for empowering the report feature.

First of all, it would help to describe the effectiveness of report transparency by describing scenarios with and without report transparency:

• In a scenario of no report transparency, reporting the action is about the extent that a player will be guaranteed to observe when attempting to police reportable actions. There are roundabout ways to find out whether the report was effective, but in general, there is no feedback saying whether it worked or not. This throws the effectiveness of the system into doubt, reducing player faith in such a system as observed on World of Warcraft. Questions like this shouldn't even have to be asked, after all.
• In a scenario with report transparency, the reported action may eventually result in punishment as in the previous scenario. Unlike the previous scenario in which I happened not to mention reports resulting in punishment, a small note of feedback will tell the player that their reports were effective (or ineffective - more on this later) when such punishment is issued. Such a message need not be specific, especially if privacy is an issue. This is because even a generic message, like in the pictures linked above, does a lot to dispel doubt, allowing players to see and show off that their actions were meaningful in policing the game and ideally improving an online community. Such a feature would also make easy work of questions like the ones linked in the aforementioned scenario.

To better summarize, report transparency provides an extra step to the reporting process that debunks claims of its impotency as reasonably as possible. It also creates an opportunity for better providing feedback for abuse of the report system, since such a system can be used to send generic warnings to the abusing players. While further transparency would be ideal when it comes to reducing lingering doubts, too much information may cause privacy issues, so a generic feedback message is a fair compromise for now.

Report transparency is important because the following benefits may occur:

• As mentioned above, report transparency empowers the report feature by showing it can be effective. The renewed faith caused by showing that the report system works will lead to more players using said system.
• The more liberal usage of reporting would also help to prevent privacy issues since it's even less likely a player will know which specific report of their many reports was effective.
• As for ineffective report feedback, there are ways of specifically showing why a report was ineffective without causing privacy issues (like by showing chat logs that the player observed from around the time of report).
• With an empowered report system in place, players wouldn't be as likely to frivolously break rules. Ideally, this would have a side effect of improving social interactions between players (and maybe cut down on the botting too).
• There is concern of censorship issues, but I would like to think this is counterbalanced by ineffective report transparency, among other things such as manual report checking.
• Report transparency may ultimately improve the image of the company employing the method by further showing they care about their playerbase by providing a feature that ideally improves the state of their game(s) in various ways.

Ultimately I think report transparency is a rather low risk, high reward implementation. This is especially the case if potential issues are accounted for such as possible censorship resulting from frivolous usage of reporting (seriously, be careful about being too authoritarian on this - it's probably worse). It's amazing what a brief popup message can do, but it's far better than providing no feedback at all. I would especially like to see this in WoW since, as I mentioned above, there's not a lot of faith in the report system in that game even if it is effective in itself.

As an afterthought, report transparency doesn't necessarily need to just apply to games. Other mediums that rely on a report function to help with moderation, such as forums, could benefit from report transparency.

League of Legends: Toxicity and Excessive Punishment

Note: Lyte made a mistake and acknowledged it as such. I will talk about people defending Lyte's original statement, why the concept within the statement is an unreasonable approach to handling toxicity, and so on before he corrected it.
First of all, I wanted to apologize. I said I was going to try not to do any of these videos for a while, but I just had to talk about this one. WoW in Retrospect should be my next non-filler video if there's no more drama for another week or two.

When it comes to my stance on toxicity, I've shown that I'm generally against it, especially through my videos and articles. One may then ask "What would you do about it?" For a time, I will admit I had a bit of a "righteous" (but actually overzealous and possibly vengeful) streak and would've taken at least a little enjoyment in seeing misbehaving individuals get punished. However, this mentality has been tempered to one of seeking reform through criticism and the like.

Riot Games has also apparently been employing such methods (of reform) by their supposed tendency to infrequently permaban (citation needed), instead opting to give toxic players many, many chances to change. Unfortunately, some (somewhat recent) implementations make me question what Riot's idea of what reform is. One that was proposed by Lyte and supported by some until his revision was so egregious that it's comparable United States handles crime (very easy to find more sources through research): through heightened incarceration, excessive punishment, and criminal dehumanization (possibly to corral them into a life of crime). To put it another way, I was inclined to criticize the initially stated plans for being overzealous to the point of contradicting Riot's vision of reform.

League Analysis: Gangplank Rework Impressions

When I started out in League of Legends, like I gravitated slightly towards Kunkka in DotA, I found myself wanting to play the seafaring Gangplank. I inevitably picked him up and went into the jungle and top lane with him for many games until I started playing ranked mode. As I played more and more League of Legends, I began to discover how desperately in need of a rework he was. He almost felt unfairly powerful, but had crippling weaknesses mostly due to a lack of numbers to back him up until he became a lategame monster.

Thus, I wrote up two reworks, with each attempting to address inconsistencies with Gangplank's abilities such as the RNG on his ult and a lack of an additional offensive ability to shift power into. Riot eventually addressed some of the inconsistencies themselves, but the more recent rework to Gangplank showed a lot of promise when I initially laid my eyes on it. After playing several games with him, I found I was correct in my initial thoughts that Gangplank was a lot better than ever. However, I also noticed some potential issues, though I think they can be easily resolved with a typical suite of balance changes. In this article, I will go over the Gangplank rework, starting with his passive and ending with his ult.

A Discussion on Blizzard's Selling of In-Game Cosmetics

When the Celestial Steed was introduced and legions of them were ridden through the city of Dalaran, part of me was very concerned about how Blizzard was handling their budding model of microtransactions. While I understood and agreed with their desire to make a bit of money off of their playerbase with optional cosmetics, the price point for them seemed very steep. I touched on this point in my recent suggestion compilation for World of Warcraft as a way to indirectly improve the experience of World of Warcraft and other Blizzard games. I personally suggested a flat decrease in the price of cosmetic goods, among other things, which would be a consumer-friendly move that improves Blizzard's reputation, helping to secure their place in the gaming industry for the upcoming years.

Unfortunately, it seems the feedback that has been made over the years by myself and others has gone ignored, as recent events related to the practice have shown that it is more of a threat than ever to Blizzard's reputation. I touched on this in my last video when I discussed how Warlords of Draenor currently brings poor value in terms of money spent vs content compared to previous expansions. falling in line with Blizzard's desire for more frequent expansion releases, which doesn't necessarily address the issue of a need for more frequent content updates. 

By following this line of thinking regarding value, I will go over Blizzard's marketing of (in-game) cosmetics and why the price points implemented years ago, which are used to this day, lack said value and thus could damage their revenue through loss of reputation. I will also review some counterarguments made in defense of Blizzard's pricing of cosmetic goods, since they help to bring out additional arguments against the practice. Finally, I will offer some suggestions beyond just telling Blizzard to lower their prices as there's a good bit of untapped potential in the cosmetic market that could be used.

League Analysis: Improving Ultra Rapid Fire Mode (More)

Ultra Rapid Fire mode is rapidly becoming something of a tradition for URF Day, with the initial debut last year on April Fools' Day resulting in a sizable amount of positive feedback to the point that Riot planned to bring it back. As promised, URF mode came back better than ever, with significant tweaks to ensure a more balanced environment that allowed for every champion to be used. However, while there was a significant positive reaction to the return of the mode, voices of concern became louder to the point that some were happy that the mode's existence was only temporary. While I personally enjoyed the mode greatly, I can understand why there's some cause for concern for the mode. Now that the mode is gone and likely to receive more changes for its debut next year (but hopefully sooner), this is a good time to consider changes that would make the game mode even more enjoyable.

Blizzard and Riot Merger To Happen Soon™

The relationship between Blizzard Entertainment and Riot Games could be perceived to be tenuous at best. Given that Riot Game's League of Legends was effectively based off of a custom map on Warcraft 3, it wouldn't be too surprising if those at Blizzard were upset. The situation could be further exacerbated by the increasing number of ex-Blizzard employees, such as former balance designer Ghostcrawler, making their way into the ranks of Riot Games. Instead, Blizzard Entertainment chose to enter the highly competitive MOBA games industry with Heroes of the Storm, which was more of a call to friendly competition and while amazingly professional, an odd direction to take given the history.

While the statements claiming that Heroes of the Storm was intended to be different from other similar games seem to hold true, it has been recently shown that this may be a cover for something that could be a truly great masterstroke that will rocket both Blizzard and Riot to the top of the gaming industry from a business standpoint. Blizzard, after the countless fiascoes when attempting to monetize content under their merger with Activision, has decided to join with Riot Games, creator of one of the largest free to play games, which is also praised for its business model regarding microtransactions. Along with this mind-blowing news, Blizzard and Riot have announced some upcoming changes related to their games. The reasoning is explained in the following quotes from Michael Morhaime and Brandon Beck respectively, the CEOs of the companies involved in the merger:

"We noticed a lot of overlap between fans of our games [in many ways]." 

"[With that said], why not make the games more appealing to our players by adding some overlap between them?"

This has already been shown through the recent addition of Bard into League of Legends, whose ultimate ability is very similar to that of one of Zeratul's in Heroes of the Storm.

The changes are as follows:

• The Season 5 World Championships will now happen at Blizzcon. The team that wins the majority of game tournaments (League of Legends, Hearthstone, WoW Arena, Starcraft 2, Heroes of the Storm, etc) held there wins the Summoner's Cup (subject to being renamed). 
• In League of Legends, destroying the nexus will no longer win the game. 
• Instead, to win, players must kill Baron, Dragon, and other neutral monsters to earn enough points to win.
• League of Legends has been integrated into World of Warcraft, with Valoran being featured as the expansion following Warlords of Draenor.
• In this expansion, PvP will receive a significant rework as characters become summoners at the Institute of War, making every PvP match one that takes place on Summoner's Rift controlling the familiar League of Legends champions.
• PvE content and questing have been completely scrapped to focus on this feature
• To further expound upon this new expansion, the next Hearthstone adventure will take place on the Shadow Isles.
• The current release date of the new expansion and adventure are not known at this time.
• Artifacts system returns to Heroes of the Storm and will work exactly like runes.
• This change should separate the good Gold farmers from the great Gold farmers.
• When the Tribunal system returns, it will work across all of Blizzard/Riot's games.
• However, the framework isn't quite finished due to lacking technology, so players can only report for Spam, Cheating, and Inappropriate Name.

More changes will be announced in time, with the next wave of announcements slated to happen on the 20th of this month.

The Open Letter to League Players Analysis: Addressing A Possible Household Issue

The following video is my response to a recent post known as "An Open Letter to Parents of League of Legends Players" (along with the response from an author of the Penny Arcade comics, not to mention the immense amount of responses on Reddit). I personally felt the issues addressed were a big enough deal to talk about:
Here are some points I made in the video or that I might've missed or not made clear:

League Analysis: The Singed Nerfs of Patch 3.04

League of Legends often needs rebalancing from time to time as an online MOBA game. While Riot Games generally does a reasonable job, they sometimes make mistakes and, given previous analysis articles, fail to acknowledge issues they create for quite some time. While I could go over some of the times when Riot really messed up on champion balance, many have been covered already in extensive detail. In addition, much like with the previous analysis article, this analysis is going to be a bit on the personal side (in the future I will probably cover cases that I take less personally). In this case, when I saw these changes I changed my main in top lane to Nasus (though there were other influencing factors as to why). In this article, I will analyze the nerfs to Singed in early Season 3 and what happened after.

Analysis of Changes

These nerfs consisted of a few seemingly innocuous changes, each of which I will review in detail starting with the change to Insanity Potion:

Insanity Potion: No longer reduces the duration of disables.

This is an understandable change considering there were future changes that removed some other champion-exclusive tenacity effects. In fact, the bonus tenacity component of Insanity Potion felt like a bit of extra hidden power that made Singed very slippery when he already has other ways to do so through Fling and Mega Adhesive. On the other hand, it arguably makes Singed stronger in the mid and late game since teamfights often happen during those phases of the game, allowing Singed to shrug off the many crowd control abilities an enemy team may be throwing around while slowly killing them all with Poison Trail. Thus, this change is a mid to late-game nerf for Singed, where he's already reasonably strong thanks to the tankiness he'll get from items and a high rank Insanity Potion's stat bonuses.

Fling: AP scaling reduced to 0.75 from 1.0 and damage reduced to 80/125/170/215/260 from 100/150/200/250/300.

Based on the statements in the patch notes preceding these chances, Riot clearly wanted to reduce Singed's burst damage by a little bit through nerfing Fling. The problem with these changes is that the first change alone probably would've been sufficient. A 25% reduction in Ability Power scaling is certainly no joke and the burst damage would generally be applied to squishier targets such as the enemy carries, who Singed is more likely to encounter when he hits his mid-game power spike and is sitting on a couple items that provide Ability Power, thus causing Fling to deal a sizable amount of their health, especially if Fling is maxed second after Poison Trail (which is somewhat uncommon).

However, by also nerfing the base damage of Fling, Singed is left with an ability that deals 80 damage for 100 mana or 125 damage for 110 mana, which is incredibly inefficient even considering that Fling is also a displacement skill. This hits his generally weaker early game, which would've probably been fine on its own since one playing against Singed can take advantage of the lesser trading capabilities and keep Singed from reaching his mid-game power levels earlier on when it would be deadly, making Singed more of a mid and late-game focused champion than he already was.

However, when coupled with the previous two changes, all three nerfs reduce the power level of Singed across the board, which is a bit overkill considering this happened over a single patch, especially since while Singed was strong, he had counterplay in the form of taking advantage of his weak, low sustain early game, using crowd control not affected by tenacity (or surprisingly, slows), and building a bit of Magic Resist for when he ultimately builds Haunting Guise and Liandry's Torment.

What Happened After?

Ultimately the Singed nerfs coupled with the Nasus buffs made me switch to a Nasus main, allowing me to climb to high Platinum ELO on the ladder. I still played Singed sometimes but felt the two champions were similar in terms of playstyle and champion matchups (for instance, they're both weak against champions that harass from range such as Teemo). Singed also saw play in both the Season 3 and 4 World Championships at some point, meaning his utility and general power was still high enough to see usage. Other more recent changes have brought Singed back to the point he's probably doing okay (chart is from Lolking), though I would happily crush any enemy Singed I ran into nowadays (though that may be because I've played him so much I know his strengths and weaknesses reasonably well).

On another note, I'll try to write any more articles on Singed for a while.

League Analysis: Ardent Censer

While I don't play League nearly as much as I used to, I still have a bit of an interest in the game. The 5th season delivers when it comes to bringing something of a new experience due to the updated Summoner's Rift. It also introduces many new items and updates to others, mostly due to the changed regeneration formula. Some items I analyzed, such as Atma's Impaler, were completely removed from the store (at least for now) because the items were essentially newb traps due to poor itemization or the like. However, some items are still lacking and one that has bothered me since its implementation is the Ardent Censer.

The Problem(s)

While the Ardent Censer is definitely an interesting item due to its passive and how it interacts with turrets and the like, it's difficult to calculate how good it is. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the baseline stats seems a bit lacking at best, meaning that in the case the attack speed ends up largely unused, which can happen in the defensive situations that the item demands (healing and shielding), it is a statistical loss of power. The item is surprisingly quite efficient stat-wise (about 113.4%) for the gold it costs (minus the attack speed granted by the shielding), but the problem is the item is very inexpensive in itself, meaning the ~2400 gold worth of stats might be efficient, but not necessarily worth the item slot.

It is worth mentioning the item isn't used a lot either according to Lolking:

Screenshot is from Lolking's current usage and win rate statistics of the item.

While the win rate for the item is extremely high (way over 50%), it jumps around a lot, which, along with a low usage percentage, suggests that the item is probably purchased when teams are about to win or are otherwise not the reason a team wins most of the time.

In addition to this, I personally find the passive (25% attack speed, really?) to be a little underwhelming for such a niche item.

The Solution(?)

It is understandable why this item was made intentionally cheap. Ardent Censer is an item that is intended for support champions who have the ability to heal and/or shield allies and that sort of benefit could be devastating if gotten early. However, other items compete with it (items that provide a high amount raw stats for cheap such as Morellonomicon or upgraded income items, etc) and are generally used a lot more (Morellonomicon's usage percentage is heavily skewed by casters who also build the item but I can't imagine why a mage support wouldn't consider the item due to its stats alone, not to mention the fact that the price is exactly the same as Ardent Censer as of this writing).

I can also understand why the passive doesn't seem that strong. While this is purely speculation, I imagine that the item's passive is deliberately a little weak to account for the power of autoattacking champions, which probably scale monstrously (especially in the late game) with additional stats such as the 25% attack speed Ardent Censer provides.

With that said, I would suggest that Ardent Censer's ability power is increased to 50 from 40, making it a bit more potent as an option among supports that favor using it compared to other items. In the long term I also believe the Ardent Censer should have an upgrade that only costs gold (much like Sightstone to Ruby Sightstone), providing some extra stats, a potentially stronger passive, and other features that benefit champions intended to purchase the item. Such an item could look like this:

Lifegiver's Boon (Mythical Item)

Builds From: Ardent Censer, 800 Gold
Total Cost: 2900 Gold

Effects: 70 AP, 100% Mana Regen, 10% CDR, 8% movement speed
UNIQUE Passive: Your shielding and healing spells grant other targets 25% additional attack speed for 10 seconds.
UNIQUE Active: The potency of your next healing or shielding ability on other targets is increased by up to 50%. 60 second cooldown.

While the item doesn't seem that much stronger stat-wise, the design is intentional since this item is meant for support champions who heal or shield. A huge amount of the power of this upgrade is instead placed in the passive, which now has an increased duration allowing the player to maintain the attack speed buff more easily or, in the case of champions with only single target heals or shields, apply the buff to multiple targets. This upgrade in particular also further emphasizes the concept of healing and shielding through its active ability. The reason the wording of the empowerment is "up to 50%" is because stronger healing or shielding abilities would benefit too well from the active.

On a related note, a lot of items with midrange prices (in the lower 2000s of pricing, usually) could potentially get an upgrade like this since a lot of them are likely to be slot inefficient. The more expensive upgrades could still be deliberately be weaker than similarly priced equivalents to compensate for the midgame power spike the former item's prerequisite items provide but it at least makes the aforementioned midrange price items a potential option in the later stages of the game.

On a final note, this is the last article of 2014. See you all in 2015!

It's Okay To Be "Bad" At Games

The following video contains an extremely long lecture in the style of previous "rants." As I mention in the video, this was intended to be a detailed article covering various acts of toxicity (and elitism, which probably falls somewhere under toxicity) but I decided to condense it into a semi-informative lecture. I originally wanted to try to improvise the entire rant, but due to recording errors and personal assessment of the clip, I decided it was better to tackle with a rough transcript instead of a brief outline. If you plan to watch, be prepared for the long haul, since this video is over an hour long.
If you wish to see the transcript I used while recording (though I didn't read directly from it too much), click the cut below:

League Analysis: A "More Extensive" Singed Rework

When patch 4.19 was released a little over a week ago, I had my eye on the rework and visual update of Singed. Since he was one of my main champions and helped carry me to Gold rank and beyond, only to be pummeled by what I believe were some heavy-handed nerfs, I felt he became a rather inferior picked (to which I responded to by picking up Nasus). While my evaluation of the state of Singed may have underestimated his potential, it is clear that his play rate dropped and has only recently been on the rise for various reasons, such as meta changes and usage in Worlds. The slight rework Singed received also helped increase his play rate as well, though it subsequently dropped.

Despite his condition in the past two seasons, Singed only received a slight rework because it was said his kit was robust. I agree with this statement, but I believe that Singed has some design flaws that were overlooked and a few parts of his kit may need some sprucing up.

What to Rework?

Singed has a few points of contention worth looking at. Based on them, I propose the following changes:

Singed gains 1.25 Magic Resist per level.

At the moment Singed has no Magic Resist per level. Given that he is classified as both a tank and a fighter, he should gain at least the same amount as other melee (1.25 Magic Resist per level). Even melee supports received Magic Resist per level over a year ago and since his kit strongly implies getting into melee range of enemies, he should probably get that extra durability.

Empowered Bulwark has been changed to Crippling Chemicals, which reduces the damage dealt by enemies affected by Poison Trail, Mega Adhesive, and Fling by 10% (or some other value), lasting for 2 seconds. In addition, Singed ignores unit collision when using Poison Trail.

While Empowered Bulwark is somewhat useful for providing Singed with a decent amount of mana to use his abilities, his mana problems later in the game aren't as significant (even without mana items due to reasons such as his Insanity Potion providing mana regeneration). In addition, while the maximum amount of bonus stats provided by the passive is a little over 4000 gold assuming he can somehow get 6 fully stacked Tears of the Goddesses (which I'm pretty sure is impossible but let's assume it is for the sake of theorycrafting the maximum potential of Empowered Bulwark), a more practical build usually yields about 500 bonus Health, or a little over 1300 Gold of stats. In addition, the passive, compared to other stat scaling passives like Vladimir's, isn't that interesting despite the existence of good defensive items with Mana.

Crippling Chemicals allows him to provide a little extra utility for his team while giving him possible jungling options. It also makes up for the loss of Empowered Bulwark by providing flat damage reduction, which will help in all stages of the game (even accounting for the fact Singed scales very well with Health compared to other defensive stats, which meant his former passive was a little stronger than it looked). The new passive also rewards enemy players for playing around Singed's mechanics and the Singed player for utilizing his mechanics well, emphasizing skillful play.

The second part of the passive is a bit of a quality of life change that emphasizes the mobility of Singed (not to mention creep block is terrible).

The Mana cost of Fling is reduced to 70/75/80/85/90.

One issue I've had with Fling for a while was that its mana cost was very high. The first rank of the skill is whopping 100 mana, meaning that Singed can only use it a few times during the early game to do a bit of damage and displace the enemy. The mana cost increases by 10 more for each rank as well, meaning the skill is costly to the point that building mana is almost mandatory. While displacing the enemy is a potent and sometimes lethal, effect, Alistar's mana costs were reduced many patches ago, especially at later ranks of the skill. A similar change would be beneficial to Singed especially since the damage of Fling is pretty similar to Alistar's Headbutt.

On a somewhat related note, the Sky Auto Attack trick should probably be fixed considering Alistar's Headbutt and autoattack combo was fixed.

Final Statements

While these changes may not seem like a lot, they are rather significant in terms of making Singed a more approachable and polished champion. He now has the stats that help his role as a melee fighter or tank, a utility-based passive that emphasizes both individual skill and group play, and a quality of life change that falls in line with other mana cost changes that have been going on for all of Season 4. I considered retaining Singed's ability to scale with Mana but he didn't scale with it hard enough to justify making him a champion like Ryze. Therefore, I instead decided to make Mana more of a bonus stat that isn't actively stacked (ideally items like Rod of Ages and Frozen Heart should still do about as much for Singed now as it did before, if perhaps a little less).

League Analysis: Mana Sustain in the Jungle and the Madstone Build

Near the start of the fourth season of League of Legends, to help out with jungler sustainability, especially earlier on, the Spirit Stone item, which was added a season prior, had its passive changed to restore health and mana based on damage dealt to monsters. This was done due to a previous revision to Spirit of the Spectral Wraith that removed its spell vamp and added a similar passive. Riot themselves said they liked the idea of the passive and added it to the Spirit Stone item line. While within a few patches it got tweaked down, the philosophy has remained and the Quill Coat item that was added also provides similar sustainability.

However, while the Feral Flare item was added to the Madred's Razors jungle item line, the items had a good bit of health sustain and none in the way of mana sustain, despite champions like Master Yi and Udyr potentially benefiting from such an effect. To be fair, the mana sustain could have some dire implications about improving already fast clear times on these carry-style champions, allowing them to reach a critical mass of power really quickly (much like the initial iteration of Feral Flare). To achieve similar carrying strength, the Madstone build, which provides a high amount of mana and health sustain along with improving clear times. While acquiring both Madred's Razors and Spirit Stone sets the jungler back, the potential gains in the form of a quickly constructed Feral Flare and additional gold from efficient clear times over the match can quickly add up.

The Problem(s)

While I think the Madstone build is a rather interesting usage of jungle items in a seemingly inefficient way that results in a fascinating interaction, I feel the following problems are presented as a result:

• As mentioned above, the Madred's Razors item line lacks any form of mana sustain, meaning the usage of Madstone to bypass that indicates a demand to provide some mana sustain to carry-style junglers.
• The need for this sort of build has an implication that "carry junglers" who build Feral Flare may need some mana sustain (which they probably can't fit into their item build).
• Multiplying the effect of the Madred's Razors (or Wriggle's Lantern) bonus damage passive with Spirit Stone's bonus damage passive, which also multiplies with the jungling champion's damage, which can potentially contain a significant amount of AoE or attacks that apply on-hit effects, can result in insanely quick jungle clears, especially for aforementioned champions like Master Yi or Udyr, though a larger number of champions potentially benefit from this build and interaction.
• This results in a situation like what I described above where Feral Flare activates very quickly because a player can defeat the number of large jungle monsters they need possibly within the minimal time needed if they were exclusively farming, if even less were they to throw in a few ganks while the camps respawn (or they successfully counterjungle huge amounts of the enemy's jungle).
• It is also worth mentioning this interaction may not be intended, not to mention it sometimes only works in a narrow set of circumstances.
• The build can provide some absolutely ludicrous sustain from the midgame onwards, allowing a player running Madstone to sustain huge amounts of their health and mana off a single jungle camp in a matter of seconds (this is even more noticeable with lifesteal for health sustain).

 The Solution

While the Madstone build isn't particularly great or as incredibly dominant as something like League of Cleavers (which is why it's been around for most of the season), it does highlight two design flaws that could be resolved with an easy fix. For instance, Madred's Razors could be revised to grant 4 Mana per basic attack against monsters, while Wriggle's Lantern and Feral Flare both grant 5. The Madstone interaction can then be removed by only allowing the jungler to have one type of jungle item at a time, much like income items.

Another Stream Schedule Revision and More...

It's been a little over a month since I've last made announcements related to my stream. As mentioned in that article, a week of inactivity has come and gone and the revised schedule has worked out reasonably well. However, real life activity and some critical thinking have led to some additional changes that will take place after I take another week of vacation. This means that next week I will not be streaming (on the dates 9/8-9/10).

As for the schedule revision, League of Legends streams will now start at 1 PM Pacific instead of 3:30 PM Pacific. I decided it's probably a lot better this way so I don't run around grabbing food and inevitably starting streams late like I am consistently at the moment. I'm also trying to prune out my playlist of songs that may trigger VOD muting due to Twitch's new audio recognition in favor of more non-copyrighted works (shout-out to people who openly allow the usage of their music for content creation, by the way - you all are awesome). By doing this, viewers who might not make the early afternoon streams can enjoy the content afterwards while I attend to other business in the evening (which is another reason for the stream time revision).

Aside from that I am probably not streaming Hearthstone a sufficient amount. I have been trying to do some earlier morning or noon streams and while I did finish up Curse of Naxxramas on Normal, I have many bosses left to defeat on Heroic. I will likely end up defeating them on stream while doing some arena and the like.

There will also be an upcoming announcement of Hearthstone videos and on my Youtube channel. While I still have to make a video reflecting that announcement that I will then upload to inform subscribers, I have a lot of unlisted Hearthstone content I've been wanting to make public for a while due to a major lack of League of Legends clips to highlight from those streams (I guess Hearthstone is much more prone to highlight bait).

Finally, while I'm not writing that publishing that many articles, I do have quite a few lines up that I should hopefully get out at a more rapid pace:

League Analysis: Atma's Impaler (Again)

League of Legends as a game enjoys frequent updates, often coupled with innovation in the form of reworks and seasonal changes. However, some items and champions are left behind, seemingly forgotten or, more likely, difficult to make viable due to potential balance issues. For instance, in the case of the champion Gangplank, he mechanically borderlines on being overpowered due to his ability to scale well with items. In addition, he is simplistic offensively and packs strong utility coupled with some free stats and other perks that make him difficult to simply patch without doing an extensive rework.

However, given the fact I've attempted to rework him once more recently to help highlight what could potentially be considered unfair design, I have also looked into some other relics of the past and one continues to come up in my mind. It was one of the first items I analyzed in League Analysis: Atma's Impaler. While my attempts to make it a more usable item were likely off the mark, I'm hoping my second attempt will be better.

The Problems

In my last analysis of Atma's Impaler, I went over how the item was slot inefficient and the stats confusing in the sense that pretty much no champion can fully benefit from the item. Over the last two seasons I've run into more specific complaints regarding this item. While there may be some reiterations of issues stated in the previous analysis, a few statements should be far more specific. For instance, issues include:

• Atma's Impaler has a low midrange price (2300 gold) with even lower stat to gold efficiency (the base efficiency is 71.7% according to the wiki article). While this efficiency can be improved with the passive, a champion would need somewhere in the ballpark of over 4000 health or more to compete with other endgame items in terms of slot efficiency (since by that point the item's stats are worth around 3810 gold).
• It is worth mentioning that a champion also needs to build health, which isn't too bad if it is needed, but the health may need to be built sub-optimally over other (defensive) stats like resilience (armor and magic resistance).
• On that line of thinking: Atma's Impaler requires a lot of stats from other sources to really shine. For instance it needs more critical strike chance built to really make that 15% critical strike chance beneficial and the player needs to build health to benefit more from the passive effect.
• The passive effect and armor imply that it benefits champions who build health (since armor would help increase physical effective health when combined with health more), but the bonus attack damage from the passive and the critical strike chance are more likely to benefit marksman-style champions.
• Very few champions benefit from both of these. A few that come to mind are Garen, Sion, and Gangplank.
• A better way to say this is the item's design goes in two directions but doesn't seem to excel at either. Combined with the slot inefficiency note above, it's difficult to make it a decent item on champions that benefit from both design directions.
• The item's build path will set the champion back in most stages of the game if they choose to build in pieces. Aside from the fact Avarice Blade probably builds into better items like Statikk Shiv and may help with the early game, having it by itself is not so great later on when Atma's Impaler shines and a player may want to build it. Chain Vest is a conditionally built item against high physical damage, meaning that if a champion needs magic resist, building a Chain Vest to make an item like Atma's Impaler would set them back at any stage of the game.
• It's also worth mentioning this item, given the fact it provides armor only as a defensive stat, makes it even more conditional to use.
• The item has most recently been changed nearly two years ago, with the last few sets of changes largely being nerfs. This means that even though items like the new Spirit of the Ancient Golem were added, Atma's Impaler, which should be favorable in a meta that allows such health stacking, is still weak (or incredibly underused).
• This essentially means the item has probably needed a rework since last season or has been left behind like other items such as Executioner's Calling and serves to clutter up the item shop.
• To be fair, the passive effect on Atma's Impaler isn't easy to balance since the nature of it gives free "burst" damage in the form of Attack Damage, meaning if it scales too well with health, tankier champions (particularly fighters) may end up doing the role of less defensive roles like assassins and marksman.

The Possible Solution

The issues listed above all point to one fate for Atma's Impaler: something about it needs to change. While my previous solution was to split the item into a build path that attempted to appeal to champions that could benefit from some stats on Atma's Impaler, the itemization was still a bit confusing (why does Slayer's Spike still have a unique passive similar to Atma's Impaler when its itemization is clearly for squishier champions who don't want health?) and the potential niches filled may already be cluttered by other items (Infinity Edge is probably a better option than Slayer's Spike and Sunfire Cape a more versatile option than Commander's Pike, etc). Short of removing Atma's Impaler (this is a valid change if only to remove an almost completely pointless item from the store), I considered a couple solutions.

The first solution was to take a more melee damage-dealer style approach and change the Atma's Impaler health to attack damage passive into something more like that of Wicked Hatchet along with some itemization changes (possibly the removal of armor, addition of attack damage, increased critical strike chance, etc). To prevent some ludicrous Marksman-related shenanigans, this item would be melee only. The problem is this could cause certain melee champions, particularly ones that benefit well from critical strike chance such as Tryndamere, to end up potentially scaling out of control.

The second solution of making Atma's Impaler more of a tank-oriented item is, in my opinion, a lot more appealing. This is how I would envision such an item:

Atma's Impaler (Advanced Item)

Builds from: Cloak of Agility, Giant's Belt
Total Cost: 2700 Gold (870 Build cost, 1730 Item cost)
Effect: 500 Health, 15% critical strike chance
UNIQUE Passive - Impale Heart: Critical strikes cause the enemy to bleed, dealing physical damage equal to 4% of your maximum health over 3 seconds. Deals a maximum of 50 damage against minions and monsters each second.
UNIQUE Passive - Life Barbs: Critical strike chance is increased by 1% of Bonus Health. In addition, critical strike chance is increased by 1% of damage suffered (before accounting for mitigation) until up to 5 seconds after leaving combat.

It is worth mentioning the item effectively has 20% critical strike chance and while the item is inefficient at base stats (it gives 2330 gold of stats), accounting for the passives should result in significant health scaling that results in nearly immeasurable stats, even if the player chooses to build resilience (due to how the Life Barbs passive works). This effectively makes Atma's Impaler the only item needed to critically strike enemies often if the Life Barb passive is utilized, thus allowing the Impale Heart passive to be utilized. Due to this design, tanky champions who normally don't need critical strike chance still benefit from using this item. In addition, the increased scaling with health is justified since the damage is made less bursty by staggering the bonus damage over time and causing the consistent application of the effect to require the champion to be in battle for a time to maximize critical strike chance.

While this item has a problem of requiring a player to sit on a couple items for quite a while until they successfully earn enough money to finish the item, the Giant's Belt is greatly beneficial for champions that desire this item since this new Atma's Impaler will likely benefit any champion that wants a lot of health. In addition, it gives players the option to build another item like Randuin's Omen if it is needed instead.

Final Statement

Atma's Impaler was an interesting piece of work in the Season 2 days when the "metagolem" build involved using it while utilizing items that provided significant amounts of health. However, the nerfs to the item coupled with changes to other items in the build caused another "metagolem" build to outshine the Season 2 predecessor and leave some items used in the build behind. While a few items, like Warmog's Armor, were changed, other items were left abandoned or infrequently changed. Given how much the meta evolves, I think Atma's Impaler deserves another chance and given the addition of champions like Zac that enjoy building health but don't benefit from the item, the overhaul I suggested seemed like a reasonable approach. Hopefully this item will be looked at for Season 5.

League Analysis: The Underused Summoners

A while ago, I wrote an article on the Clairvoyance summoner spell. This was due to a number of reasons, but the fact it is so rarely used (particularly after a period of frequent usage a couple seasons ago) is one of the major reasons for the analysis. After writing the article, I thought back on other summoner spells that don't see use. When Heal was changed, I thought other summoner spells that didn't see much use would also see improvement. However, months after the Heal change, there doesn't seem to be any further changes in sight for the other summoners that don't see much use. In this article I will go over the summoners I find to be underused (particularly in Summoner's Rift) and describe potential reasons for their lack of use and, if relevant, suggest potential adjustments (within reason) that could see increased use of the summoner spell.

League of Legends: Patch 4.12 and a Brief Follow-up on Essence Reaver Analysis

Nearly a week ago, the 4.12 patch notes for League of Legends got posted with the changes listed implemented the following day. While I don't normally review patch notes for League of Legends because the more recent ones do a decent job explaining the design intent behind changes and numerous players also giving their two cents on the changes up to the implementation on live servers, given my recent analysis on Essence Reaver, I thought I would address a couple of the changes in this patch, starting with the major change to Essence Reaver:

The Essence Reaver had its damage increased by 20 (from 60 to 80), with the item building out of a B.F. Sword and Vampiric Scepter and costing a total of 3400 Gold from 2650.

While the item has lost 30 Gold in net efficiency (the item gained 20 Attack Damage, which is 720 Gold's worth of stats against the 750 Gold increase in price), it is now a lot more slot efficient and may be a solid item on Marksman champions, which was the design goal stated in the 4.11 patch notes. While this change seems to go in the opposite direction of creating an item that provides mana sustain for AD-scaling champions in lane, it could also potentially provide an opportunity to add a smaller item that can build into the more expensive Essence Reaver that provides a lesser version of the mana sustain passive on Essence Reaver. In addition, Essence Reaver's Attack Damage bump makes it a very strong item in the niche of providing a large amount of Attack Damage coupled with Cooldown Reduction, which could benefit a number of champions that may need to consider options like Black Cleaver and Youmuu's Ghostblade otherwise.

With that said, let us move on the smaller Manamune change:

Manamune has had its attack damage increased to 25 from 20 and now builds from a Pickaxe instead of a Longsword. Manamune's cost has been increased by 100 Gold.

While this change doesn't particularly do much in the way of helping AD-scaling champions in the way of mana sustain, I do approve of this change because it gives champions that benefit from having Mana access to the more powerful Pickaxe for some extra damage as opposed to building a Longsword and then pooling over 1000 Gold to build Manamune. The small extra bump in Gold Price increase compared to the 5 Attack damage increase also results in 80 Gold of net efficiency stat-wise.

In the future, if some part of the patch notes is relevant to an analysis I have done, I may do this again, though it may not always happen.

More Stream Announcements: Minor Schedule Revision, Hearthstone Stream Update, And Maybe More Games?

It's been over a month since the last announcements for my stream, mostly resulting from some events in real life that made it more difficult to stream four times a week without adding weekend streams. After experimenting with the slightly revised stream schedule and the addition of Hearthstone, I have decided to make a few revisions to the stream schedule. In addition, I received some criticism regarding the content I stream and would like to address it. In the following paragraphs, I will go over each topic in greater detail.

While there are some personal reasons for this change, the weekend stream time starts were very inconsistent due to real life reasons. This inconsistency results in a disconnect between me and the viewers in terms of when the stream is up to watch, as I don't expect viewers to use Twitter or follow me on Twitter (not to mention Twitch isn't too great at showing when streamers you follow are streaming on the front page). As a result of these facts, I have decided to make the weekend stream more of an optional event as opposed keeping to the "four League of Legends streams a week" that I was attempting to adhere to. Having the three weekday streams each week (though they are probably shorter than I would like) is solid in terms of consistency.

After trying to stream Hearthstone on a regular basis that isn't quite a set schedule I found it isn't too conducive to the pattern I play the game. While a daily routine is great, forcing myself to try to stream every day (or almost every day) rapidly became more of a chore as opposed to an enjoyable experience. With this observation in mind, I feel the quality of the stream would be better if I streamed Hearthstone when I feel like doing my dailies or an arena run (which I almost always want to commentate so that I can explain my reasoning for card draft choices and gameplay decisions) as opposed to making it seem like a mandatory activity. On the other hand, since Curse of Naxxramas is coming out in a few days, there may be a lot more Hearthstone activity on the channel.

Finally, I asked a few friends for criticism regarding my stream. The criticism that seemed to be most prominent among them was adding more games to the roster. While I won't pretend that monetizing the Twitch stream isn't some sort end goal I think about, after much deliberation, I realized I may want to reconsider my priorities by not trying too hard to force my stream to become a source of income (however minor it would probably be) and have a little fun instead. While I'm not sure how many more games I will stream at this time, my increasing activity in World of Warcraft makes it a good candidate for potentially adding to the roster of streamed content. In addition, my second stream will probably be put out of commission in favor of streaming almost everything to my main channel. I will make some revisions to my profiles on Twitch (and Twitter) as I figure out whether to expand from League of Legends and Hearthstone.

That's pretty much it in terms of announcements at this time. It is also worth mentioning that it is extremely unlikely I will be able to stream during late August to early September due to personal reasons. I apologize in advance.

League Analysis: Essence Reaver

It was but a couple of weeks ago and the World Cup was blazing in full fury in Brazil. While I was rooting for a few teams, what I was really looking at was patch 4.10 and the new World Cup skins on League of Legends. There were a few new items making their way into the game and while I already covered Ardent Censer, I didn't cover the other item: Essence Reaver. Given this is an analysis article, it is implied the prognosis for this item is rather grim despite it being a new addition, even if it is a niche item (meaning it's unlikely to be used by a large number of champion).

League Analysis: Gangplank Rework Redux

Note: I am aware of the upcoming rework for Gangplank. It looks promising (it gives Gangplank an AoE attack and curbs some of the ridiculous power from his kit that makes him difficult to balance), so that's something. I'll probably analyze it after I get some games in on him.

Champion reworks are something that are becoming commonplace in League of Legends lately given the increasing interval between champion releases and the need to bring older champions up to date mechanically and the like. These champions are often underused in the metagame at the time of their reworks. Though there are some champions that are heavily underused (Urgot, Sion, and so on), there are reworks on the horizon for them. One champion that is on the list is one that I have already discussed, but a recent Reddit thread and the dubious possibility of a rework any time soon has led me to once again look at the champion Gangplank, especially because my last proposed rework was on the right path but wasn't thorough enough.

Stream-Related Announcements: Time Revisions and Addition of Hearthstone

As mentioned in my previous set of announcements, I anticipated that I may have to make additional announcements, mostly ones related to my stream. While I didn't expect to have to do so so soon, I managed to find more work so it is now necessary to revise my stream times. I have also considered other outlets besides League of Legends in terms of streaming content and after much deliberation, I believe I have an ideal game to add to the schedule. With that said, let's go through these announcements individually.

First of all, my new line of work lands on a Thursday, meaning it would be impossible to stream on that day with the current schedule. Therefore, the time of that day slot is being changed to Saturday or Sunday. I will announce on Twitter as to when my stream is about to start so if you are actively following my stream I would highly recommend keeping on eye on my updates for weekend streams. The exact time these streams start are also unknown due to various reasons, such as general availability to commentate. In addition, the times for the Monday-Wednesday streams have been pushed to 3:30 PM to better reflect the time I actually start my streams. I simply prefer to start the streams later and have noticed activity picks up during later hours (though I would still recommend keeping an eye on Twitter for updates).

Secondly, as the tags and title of this article might imply, I will likely be adding Hearthstone to my streaming schedule (starting next week as of this posting). However, unlike with League of Legends, the frequency and time of this stream will not be set. The only thing that will likely be consistent is that the stream will be every day and not that long since I'll probably log on to do dailies and maybe some arena. These streams will not be announced on Twitter. These streams have a good chance of not having commentary either, as they will often be later into the night when attempting to commentate will cause noise disruption and the like. I will mark streams (all my streams) with "Silent" or otherwise to indicate there is no commentary during that particular streaming session, though in the case of Hearthstone I will likely still interact through the chat. This is all subject to change based on how interested viewers are in the Hearthstone content (though I'm not exactly the best or knowledgeable player).

And those are the announcements for now. Also I was out of town for the weekend and various things came up last week that disrupted my streaming schedule but that should all be resolved now (especially with these announcements to sort things out).