So Picks and Bans did Win the Game. Mostly.

               For those of you that did not partake in the spectacle of the League of Legends world finals than you missed out on well… A bit of a stomp to be frank.  SK Telecom T1 ran right through China’s Royal Club in a convincing 3-0 fashion. While I had previously predicted a 3-1 victory by SKT I was quite surprised with the total sweep. One of the funny things about SKT is that they almost always lose the first 1-2 games in a best of X series. For whatever reason something happened on Friday night though, that allowed them to overcome that and crush on through. I will contribute a huge part of SKT victory to their Picks/Bans phase of the game, or maybe to Royal’s mistakes in the same phase.  There was a \ key error and a smart decision in champ select that I want to talk about myself.

               The first of these was ignoring Jax completely by Royal Club. I wouldn't criticize if they let it through in game one and then banned it out because of what a problem it caused.  If they had let it through twice and tried to counter it in game 2 I wouldn’t be upset. However, they let it through in all three games and Impact made himself known on the Grand master of Arms. (Jax) Malphite in game one would've had to get way in front of the Jax in order to stop the split pushing threat it created, although I applaud them for trying at least. The rumble pick in game two was only marginally better. Royal Club known with a Rumble in lane that Jax wouldn't immediately become a monster,  but like the rest of the picks in game 2 it resigned itself  to losing lane overall. Game 3 fell somewhat into the same boat as the first, a curious choice to lane a Kennan against the Jax, but smart rotations from SKT saw that game end by 20 minutes, which is about as fast as you can win a game of League.

               The smart decision from SKT was the consistent bans on Renekton and Annie. Not only are both these champions comfort picks for Royal Club, but both of them also fit into Royal Club’s fighting and dive oriented style of play. Removing the nigh invincible tank Renekton forced royal away from having a consistent tank that could really initiate a dive under the tower, while keeping Annie away from shot caller Tabe forced him to pick Sona in every single game, which allowed SKT to anticipate the pick and counter it in lane, thus making it very difficult for Sona to be effective.

               So yes, the finals were a stomp, guess what? It happens sometimes. Some teams just show up much more prepared and hungrier for a championship than others. It happens. Stop complaining to Riot about it, it’s not like they wanted a stomp either. Close series bring in more viewers, fact. Congrats to SK Telecom Team One regardless. 

Look at them in their nerdy glory!

Why Picks and Bans Could Decide Season 3.

Tonight, possibly the largest event in E-sports history will talk place. Scratch that, this will be the largest event in E-sports. At Nine P.M. Mountain time, at the Staples centers in Los Angeles SK Telecom Team One of Korea will face off with Royal Club of China for the League of Legends Season Three championship and the Summoner’s cup. The clash will be for the ages, as vastly different styles of play clash against one another and I am absolutely hyped up about this.

Oddly enough, the part of tonight that I am most excited about will probably be the Picks and Bans phase of the game. Since this is my favourite part of the game I’m going to go pretty in depth about how this phase of the game goes. Ready for a pretty in depth look at what is only a 5 minutes portion of the game?! Yeah you are! Let’s go! I’ll be using some terminology you might now be familiar with so I’ll explain them at the end.

First off we look at what sides each team are on. There is the Blue side and the red side. Blue side bans and picks first. So Blue selects a champion (character) to ban away from play. Then red side team bans a champion and this goes on two more times and we have three cham

pions banned on each side. Then the blue side again takes the 1st of five picks. After that the red side takes their 1st and 2nd pick, blue then takes 2nd and 3rd picks, red 3rd and 4th pick, blue 4th and 5th pick and finally red takes the last and 5th pick for their team. After this the picks/bans portion of the game ends and the actual game begins.

So why on earth does this interest me so much? Because games are won and lost at this phase. Im serious, sometimes teams outpick their opponents and the game pretty much ends right there. Not really, but anyone with a brain thats seen league played before can see what's coming. This could be especially true in tonight's matches because both teams are so good that if they do outpick their opponents they will not screw it up. This is why I believe that this phase of the game will be so crucial tonight. So without further ado lets go into what I think will be important bans and picks tonight!

I’ll go through this position by position. (There are 5, top, jungle, mid, ad carry and support.) First top lane picks and bans. From SKT T1 I expect to see Renekton banned away, Royal Club’s top laner GoDlike has shown excellent proficiency with the champion and it fits Renek fits in so well with a dive/fighting focused team. He can jump headfirst into big fights or towers and often come out the other end alive because of how tanky he is. With picks I think SKT T1 will be looking for either Shen to give a solid tank/split pusher with a global or Jax to become a split pushing monster. Royal Club will probably be required to ban out Jax in nearly every single game unless they want to make a move with GoDlike playing it himself.

The jungle is going to probably be the most boring part of picks/bans tonight. Both Lucky and Bengi of Royal Club and SKT T1 respectively have shown a huge preference to play differant junglers and neither one of them has been game breaking enough to require a ban. So Expect to see Bengi play Lee Sin and Lucky on Elise unless something weird happens.

Mid lane is one of the most interesting because of what a huge emphasis has been put on this slot throughout the tournament. In the beginning of the world championships everyone was talking about Assassin Champions in the mid lane. That being Champions that were very adept at picking out a single target of a team and eliminating them quite quickly. Many games occurred when every single popular assassin was banned out entirely because of how dangerous it was to allow it onto the opposing team. Fizz, Ahri and Zed, and even Kassadin if you were playing the European Fnatic squad were heavily banned out. I expect this trend to continue. Three of the six bans will probably be spent on teams making sure those champs are not played. Both teams have created strategies that fix this problem though. Faker of SKT T1 has found two solutions actually. The first being a rapid expansion of his champion pool to include unconventional assassins like Lissandra and Riven, and the second being to focus on more utility like mid champions such as Gragas and Orianna. Wh1t3zZ of Royal Club more on utility champions solution more with all three of their wins against Fnatic coming from him playing the Utility champs like Orianna and Kayle. I expect Orianna to be a very high priority pick from both teams tonight and would even go to say that it will be likely to see the red side team banning the champ away every time. That will mean that most likely 4/6 bans will be devoted to mid laners. Huge impact on the game.

The bottom lane with AD carries and Support I’ll talk about together since they go to the same lane. This will be a very interesting lane to see played out, but I don't think many interesting things will happen with picks/bans here. There simply aren't enough bans to go around with so many going to the mid lane. I think a contested pick will be Caitlyn just due to how safe she is, with all that range and solid scaling into late game I won't be surprised if either Piglet or Uzzi pick her. However, I also wouldn't be surprised to see Uzzi and Tabe of Royal Club to go with the Twitch and Annie lane if neither of them is banned out. Piglet will play Ezreal, Cait or Vayne. I don’t think Corki is going to that important of a pick, but I could be wrong. Uzzi will be looking for Twitch, Vayne or Cait. Tabe will play Annie if available or Sona if not, Poohmando likewise will play Zyra if available and probably thresh if not.

So there you have it, my thoughts and what champions are going to be played, banned and be critical in whoever is going to win tonight. Good luck and have fun to both teams! PS I’m on the Korean hype train and think SKT T1 will win in a 3-1 score line.

Dive - When a player pushes forward into a enemies tower to initiate a fight, its dangerous because enemy towers do a lot of damage to your character and quickly.

Split pushing - When one member of a team goes into a lane and attempts to force the other team to react to it. Usually done by either a champion with a global or one that is a very strong duelist forcing the enemy team to send more than 1 person to stop it and that puts that team in a bad posistion.

Assassin - A champion that specializes in picking a specific target out and eliminating them very quickly. Didn’t really need an explanation did it?

Champion Pool - Every player has a list of Champions that they feel comfortable playing in a competitive setting. That is their pool.

AD carry - a character designed to inflict very large amounts of physical damage but is very weak on the defensive. Think glass cannon.

Yes, I'm aware that SKT T1's bot lane is named Pooh and Piglet. I am aware. Its adorable.

Fun week!

               This was a good week, I’m going to be pretty straight up about that. I accomplished two major things that I wanted to do with my summer. One was out of necessity and the other less vital but of similar value to me, if that makes sense. I like didn’t need it, but I really wanted it.

               First off, I found a place to live this fall! WHOOOOOOO! That’s a huge relief for me, because as I began my search things just weren’t really going my way with it, so when I started the week I was starting to legit think I might be bumming off couches for the first month of my life in Edmonton. Jeez that would have been an experience. Probably would have sucked, but I would have learned a lot from it. That doesn’t really matter now because I did find a place to live. Nothing super special about it, 5 bedroom place in Southeast Edmonton, it has close proximity to shopping and LRT so I don’t need a car up there. (Huge plus for me!) It has a surprisingly nice looking kitchen in my opinion. But yeah, the LRT location is important for me because….          

Pretty Good for a Rental eh?

               With the confirmation that I will not need a car, I felt comfortable enough with my money to order the parts to my PC that I’m building! Yay! Isn’t it cool how those things actually link together like that? The build I decided to go with is the same one I talked about in my last post, so I don’t feel like I need to link it again. About 1100$ cost including shipping and handling, and Im confident that it will be able to do what a 1800$ pre-made rig would, so yeah. Lesson to the peoples, building yourself is way more cost efficient than buying a pre-made.

               You know what else I just thought of that makes this week even better? I’ve found what I believe to be a solution to my frustrations with League of Legends. Stop playing ADC. (Attack Damage Carry, I shot things a lot and win fights for my team.) Why? Because when I play ADC I feel an obligation to carry my team through the ENTIRE game. That’s not good, because when I think like that I get really hypercritical of my own mistake which leads to most of my frustrations. So I’m going to be looking to play more assassin like roles. Cause then I just make plays and be a cool dude. Yay!

               So yeah! Good week overall. Like a solid 8.5/10 More blogging next week! Or maybe tomorrow. Provably next week though. 

Lots of Small Rants and Birthdays

               Well it’s been a bit of time since I really sat down to write something, mostly because I haven’t; felt like I really had anything worth saying on the blog, but a good friend of mine in Chrissy Williams asked about it today and since it is her bloody birthday after all I guess I can muster enough motivation to put at least one post together.

               So what to talk about? This is kind of the problem eh? I usually want to write about just one thing but I suppose writing on several things isn’t that bad right?

               So let’s start here. This is the going to be the computer I build later this summer. It`s almost entirely based on this build. I excited to build it. There were a couple of parts I thought about changing up, but ultimately this would be the best bang for my buck. I like my laptop and all, but let’s get serious; you need a desktop to get the performance I want without paying like $2500 or so. This build is about $1000 and should be able to play any game I want and record/stream it with at least passable quality.  So yeah, building a computer like this is like way way way worth it because I’ll save hundreds of dollars that would have had to be spent on a pre-made computer. The only real downside to this is that when it’s done, everyone that I’m related to will think I’m some sort of expert that can fix any of their computer problems for them. Which might be true, but only because I know how to use this site.

               Quick note on my thoughts about Yeezus and Magna Carta Holy Grail. Yeezus not that good. Magna Carta quite an enjoyable listen. It seems to me that Kayne feels like he still needs to prove himself, which he totally doesn’t. Jay-Z though just makes stuff he likes and it sounds like that. Thus fun to listen to. Magna Carta is not a very deep album in all honesty, buts I like listening to it. Don’t take these criticisms to seriously though, cause you know. I’m not really qualified in any way. (Pseudo-intellectualism at its finest!)

               As a final note let’s just briefly mention that the United States government recently recognized players of the League of Legends Championship Series as professional athletes with the same visa privileges as players of the NFL, NBA, NHL and other organizations. This is huge. It means that E-sports is really here to stay. Huge numbers at the Evolution championships this weekend are also another great sign for the community. All in all, I’m super excited for this fall so I can watch The International Three (Dota 2) Season 3 Worlds (League of Legends) and WCS finals at Blizzcon (SC2) Gonna be a huge time for E-sports this fall. One can only hope to see my boys Dignitas make it to Worlds for League. If your intrested in reading more about the whole League players getting recognized as pro athletes you can read the article here. 

So Good!

               

Shoutouts and Feeling Good!

               It has been quite the week let me tell you. Filled with all sorts of experiences and feelings. Some good and some bad, but in an effort to stick to what I was talking about in my last post I am going to be focusing solely on the positive things from my last week. I’ll talk about two three things in particular.

               The smaller one was that I once again returned to the work force back under the employ of the Town of Magrath. Even though I haven’t been paid yet for my work it feels really great to one know that there is income that will be coming in and secondly that I actually have something to do during the day now! Man, you would be surprised what full time work can do for a guy that’s bored, suddenly I hardly feel like I have spare time at all and its awesome!

               The big one that I really want to talk about was the opportunity I had to see one of my absolute best friends and a critical figure of my life get married to the man she loves. Big congratulations to Samara and Scott Dewey! It was so easy to see from the way they look at each other that they have a bond that is simply unbreakable. I’m thrilled that she found someone so good for her. I've probably talked about this before, but I've always felt like I had this “Duty” to ensure that the two Lybbert girls that I knew well ended up happy and with good people for them. I think this because I feel like I owe it to them. In reality any positive attribute I've developed over the past few years could in one way or another be attributed to something they did to help me grow.  I know for a fact that neither one of them realizes what they've done for me over the years. So yeah, it was important for me to see her so happy with Scott and I would be a liar if I told you that I didn't shed a tear during that day. Augh, how embarrassing.

               This isn't quite as long as I wanted so I’ll throw another positive thing that came out of a negative thing. Suffice to say there was drama this week and I got to discover that a friend of mine is a truly outstanding individual. I haven’t had the chance to properly thank Makinna Kristensen for how helpful she was this past week. I most definitely owe her one. 

               Well this was nice, I like all these positive feelings and such. Maybe I should like try to keep this positive vibe going. confirmed, Being positive is good. Jonny Tollestrup 2013. You can quote me on that. 

Unrelated picture of Fiji cause I can. 

Change of Plans Folks!

               Right, so I’m going to go ahead and change up the summer goal deal. I’m only changing the goals in regards to gaming so really no one ought to care much for it. Originally I set out to complete a run through of Ocarina of Time, The Wind Waker and reach Diamond rank in Starcraft II. While it’s defiantly not that far out of reach to complete this, (Ocarnia of Time already done, Wind Waker can probably be complete in a single day with some dedication and a red bull and I finished Top 8 in platinum for the previous ladder season of Starcraft, which is basically as close to diamond you can get without actually making it.) I've decided it’s not really what I want from my gaming experience right now.  

               What do I mean when I say that’s not what I want from a gaming experience right now? Simple really, I play games for one of two reasons. First being I like becoming immersed in a new world and all of the cool details that go along with it. That normally lies within a Single player game when the narrative or game play is the driving feature. The Second reason is that I’m competitive and I can win at them. This is where Starcraft and League of Legends come in, and at the moment it’s really all I've been playing, and I’m getting increasingly more frustrated every time I play them. I play games because I enjoy them, and in reality I’m just not enjoying games like Starcraft or League right now. So I’m taking an indefinite break from them until I feel like I've “ Calmed the freak down.”

My average face while playing League, Witnesses can confirm unfortunately.  

               My plan to calm down is going to come by rediscovering the first reason I play games. I've always greatly enjoyed the experience of becoming part of a completely different world. That’s why I particularly love games like Mass Effect, Skyrim, Dragon Age, and The Legend of Zelda. They are all these fantastical worlds that simply don’t exist in reality but are very interesting to explore and learn about. So for the time being I’m going to focus on playing single player games and trying to remember why I love games in the first place. It’s like a good movie really, because you kinda forget that you’re just a viewer or player and simply become part of the world. It’s partially why I like games so much, just by the very nature of you participating in a game makes them feel more immersive. You know? Maybe not, but it’s true.

               Taking a break from games like League does leave me in a mild dilemma though, how on earth am I supposed to help my friend Seth with his not sure if serious or not idea of making a gaming Youtube channel if I’m not playing the leagues with him? Let’s play’s? Come on, no one really wants to watch someone like me with no presence in any gaming community play through what can easily be a 20 hour game like Mass Effect. So with the power of editing I plan on making simple highlight stuff. Parts of games that I think people need to know why they make those games good. Maybe look at freak out about how dumb I think that game design has changed so dramatically in the past twenty years. (It’s no actually dumb, it’s just be being a baby.) Who knows what’ll happen, I know it’ll be fun though. That’s why I’m doing it. Also the rare chance for dat YouTube money obviously. 

How Real am I?

               Jeez, I am just awful at keeping up with this eh?

               Anyways, let’s get a quick update going here. Since my last post I have become unemployed. I have been unemployed for this entire month. I decided to leave my previous employment for lack of better words, “Scheduling conflicts.” Getting consistent work was a struggle and I just decided that it wasn’t worth the hassle anymore.  It may have been smarter to just stay on until I had another job lined up, but it is what it is.  It’s also been quite the drain on my bank account. I learned how to do my own taxes though, so I guess that’s neat. I also learned how to make Sloppy joes, which sounds really easy and in reality it is pretty easy. Here’s my obligatory picture!

              

You can't really see the actual part I made, but trust me, it was good. 

               The really big thing that this month has given me is an insane amount of time to think. Like its just silly how much thinking I’ve been able to do this last month. There’s still a whole freaking week left in it to! My goodness. One of the really big things I’ve been thinking about though is me. No not in the ego driven oh my look how cool and awesome and good looking I am and everyone who doesn’t see that just doesn’t get me way. Ugh. Goodness that would be just awful. I’ll be frank, I’m not a very positive person to begin with (Shocking!) but the fact of the matter is that the person I’m hardest on has and probably will always be myself. I use the term Self-loathing when I describe it to other people and I often mask it jokes. While I do definitely think that if you don’t know how to laugh at yourself, for better or worse, you are going to have a bad time. For real.  However, just acknowledging your flaws through jokes is not enough. If a person isn’t even trying to fix those flaws with themselves and just continues to just joke about it, I kind of find it disgusting. This sucks, because I’ve been feeling like I have been like that for a while now. I’m making so little effort to really move forward with my life right now. I refuse to adopt an exercise schedule simply because of my laziness. I’ve been falling back on calling out people when they are being stupid, which is something I actually liked about myself. I wasn’t afraid to tell someone that what they were doing isn’t smart at all. I really haven’t been doing that. I’m working on that though, so I guess it’s not a total loss there. I’ve continually allowed my diet to remain absolutely abysmal. I’m not looking for new and interesting music, just listening to the same stuff over and over. The only thing I really have going for me right now is that I am in fact going to be attending school in the fall. As my sister so eloquently put it, “Yay for real life plans!” Lastly I feel like I’ve totally lost touch with what I can do with my sarcasm. I used to be able to pretty accurately pin down what jokes I could or could not make without legitimately upsetting someone. I just feel like I cross the line every bleeding time right now

.

               I guess I just needed to really take the time to call myself out on what a miserable human being I’ve been for the past few months. The goals I made for the summer were supposed to change that. I guess I’m really down right now because it’s really the first time that I’ve looked back and thought, “Man that guy from 6 months ago wasn’t such an idiot.” To clarify, I’ve always felt like I’ve made good progress as a person every few months and I just don’t feel like I have these last few. Only thing to do though is just step my game up, moping about it on the interenet doesn’t change anything.