Rant 276 / I Am I Because I Am Here

Now I notice that I have quite a collection of wallpapers. In fact, my last count gave me 82.3MB worth of nice high-res pictures. Due to the random order that I've been dumping my wallpapers with, I no longer can remember which exactly I have displayed here. Therefore I'm not going to dump anymore. There are other ways to upload them, but I see no necessity for the work required.








I gave up on Dirge in DotA. It is so different from the previous Undying that I'd rather play as the Slithereen Guard. At least SG has a stun skill and Bash. The Sprint is also quite handy for a quick escape. Dirge just plain sucks.

From now on, I'm most probably playing as the Necrolyte. It's now very easy to use - only 2 skills are non-passive! So all I need is to keep 2 fingers on the shortcut keys.

But now that I've tried SG, I find it quite cool to actually be able to escape when I get ganked. Usually for Intel heroes, when I see a tank popping out from the trees, I knew right away I'm as good as dead. And I'm always right.

But as the SG, I can stun, Sprint and escape! This is something I haven't quite managed to accomplish ever since I began to focus on Dirge a year ago.







One lesson I've learnt today about buying water heaters is that I have to find out if it will affect the power of the spray. My new heater weakens the shower's spray so much, I think my daily morning piss has far more impact than it. Good thing my showerhead has different types of spray and one of them is able to squeeze water flow enough to increase the pressure to a more suitable level. Pic below illustrates what I had in mind before I tested the shower.



This is Garena, or what you get if you use Garena for DotA. Instead of a list of games in MIRC, all the games in your room will be listed here in LAN. Convenient. However, as you can see there aren't many games on.

This is because I was in DotA Room 14 of Singapore when I took this screenshot.

There are 50 rooms for DotA in Garena, but right now on a Sunday afternoon, only about 35 rooms have over 200 ppl. Each room is limited to 225 ppl, and only Gold members (paid membership) can enter rooms with 225 or more ppl.

This also means that all the rooms will have their own games and one does not see the unified listing system that Zion has. Worse is that there are many who stay and go AFK because each second in the room gives you exp that raises your level. The level is displayed on the upper right corner of the screen.

The leveling system allows experienced players to enter rooms that newbies cannot. In Garena's Singapore server, the first two DotA rooms are only for level 10 and above members. The next two are for level 5 and above. This means that if you're playing games in those rooms, chances are you won't find as many noobs, leavers and griefers.

Plus Garena allows you to tunnel to the host and use the Anti-Spike function. Tunneling means a better connection to the host. Anti-Spike will reserve extra bandwidth to prevent lag spikes. There are 4 degrees of Anti-Spike: None, Normal, Strong, Stronger.

For most of my time in Left4Dead, Normal is good enough. The higher the degree of Anti-Spike, the more bandwidth it eats up. I always leave some bandwidth for my other programs like anti-virus auto-updates and Windows updates. So Normal for me is fine in L4D. No idea if it is necessary in DotA.


So Garena is actually better than Zion except for the game listing system. I'd recommend having both since Garena doesn't take much disk space. Garena also caters to many other games like RA3, CoD and L4D. Plus it hosts tournaments where Garena members get to watch international matches played by clans around the world.

A few days ago I watched a DotA match between a Spanish-speaking (I think) team and a English-speaking team. No idea where they are from. Since they didn't use the ingame chat much, which implies they were using a voicechat program, it made the game seem boring and I left after 5mins.