Waiting for the Rift early start has, surprisingly, been painful. I’m just very, very ready to get going officially and see how everything plays out. I’m curious how the servers will fair. I’m curious to see how the game handles so many players in one area after all these beta rounds. And most of all, I’m curious to see how sucked-in I get with the game. When WAR came out, despite all its inevitable issues, I had a blast playing with people well into tier 4. Even if Rift is just that all over again (and I expect it to be much more), that’s still good gaming. But for now, we wait.

In League of Legends, I just can’t break out of the 1200s. Every three game winning streak that puts me at 1250+ is followed by 2-3 losses that drop be back to just over 1200. When I jungle with Warwick our lanes get dominated. When I mid with Teemo our duo-lane gets rocked, our jungler can’t gank to save his life, and at the end Teemo is just not a hard-carry who can solo-win games. When I go with Shen, my team plays dance-dance-revolution as I die first, they get rolled after, and the guy who I ult to save him so he can keep dealing damage runs so far out I’m totally out of taunt range. It’s tragic yet comical really.

More than knowing builds, selecting the right champs, or buying wards, playing scared will cost you a game. Bad players play scared. Watching Aria play around the 900 level, basically every game is like this. Way too many games at 1200 are also like this.

People see a 4v5 opportunity in a lane (one enemy is visible in the top lane) and rather than jump on the enemy, they dance around and stall. The whole team will sit at a tower to ‘defend’ while only three enemies keep them there; the other two are off farming and getting solo-lane XP while your team splits one lanes XP five ways, with two lanes of XP being wasted. Bad players will wait for the enemy to start a 5v5 with them, rather than starting their own. It’s not difficult to understand that if you have to react to what the enemy is doing, rather than the other way around, you have already lost. That if a fight ends with three enemies dead at the expense of two teammates, that’s a good trade. That a carry exchanging kills/deaths with a support is a good trade for your team, etc.

Hopefully Riot adds a replay function soon, so people can watch top-tier play and learn some of this stuff. Back when I played Warcraft 3 at a decent level, watching top player replays with commentary was invaluable, as they not only explained what they were doing, but why, and it almost always comes down to forcing your will on your opponent and making them react to you rather than being passive and reacting to them.

Finally, my current Mount and Blade: Warband game is moving along slowly (Day 500+). I now have eight lords in my kingdom, and at the moment we are at peace with the rest of the world. Just before this it’s been constant fighting, and I’ve had close to a dozen siege defenses now were my 300ish defenders stop an army of 1000+ at Uxkhal or Praven (yes, oddly enough, my kingdom is basically the land Swadia starts with. This was unintentional for the most part). I can’t say I see a real ‘end’ here, as right now just keeping my eight lords happy is tough, and we don’t even own that much territory. The plan however is to slowly expand one castle at a time, hopefully securing the Nord area to our North, before pushing into Veigar territory in the North-West. That said, one bad round of “everyone declares war on you” and we might be back to holding out at just our cities of Praven, Suno, and Uxkhal.