A Backloggery Beatdown properly delivered on the first full week of a new month? What sorcery is this???
Well, after publishing a Backloggery Beatdown for an entire fiscal quarter, I decided that I definitely did not want to do that again. Unfun. Better to stay on schedule, even if I have little to report.
Little to report is correct; I made a personal oath to not play any new video games until after I have a post pending for publication on my blog in order to incentivize a regular publication schedule.
It is a shame that I pre-purchased Diablo IV and have yet to play the full version, lol. Nevertheless, June was not a complete failure.
Dota 2
Yes, I know that comparatively, DotA 2 is an unpopular game in the shadow of games like Genshin Impact and Fortnite. However, I have good reason to discuss this game yet again.
After a two-year hiatus (honestly five if one omits when I played only during the summer leading up to The International), I started playing DotA 2 again in earnest in 2021. I intended to grind ranked, but what I really ended up doing was treadmilling. For two years, I languished in virtually the same ranked tier, from Crusader 1 to Archon III. I spent most of this time in Crusader, better known as “2k DotA.”
I achieved my goal of returning to 4K MMR for the first time since 2013, when my life was in a much worse state, and I was playing the game to the detriment of my real life. However, I was not able to reach this milestone on my own:
•Valve banned 40,000 accounts for cheating in DotA. This includes things like maphack and scripting for Tinker or Invoker spammers. It is no mistake that I almost never see Invoker or Arc Warden anymore.
•Valve released a patch that killed Overwolf, a 3rd party program that would provide data to players during the pre-game sessions when players select heroes to ban or counter pick. As a hero spammer myself, I often fell victim to this, but I hardly ever benefited from it.
•Valve eradicated the trench with the glicko rating system. Many players joked about the trench as a myth, and that if one is good enough, they will climb in MMR. Only now do I agree with this sentiment; in the past, wins and losses were +/= 30 MMR. Those of us in the trench cannibalized each other and many of us appeared stagnant as a result. Well, a picture is worth more than my words:
With one stroke of an update, Valve eliminated the clustering that was happening at the lower ranks, to a true bell curve. I benefited royally, calibrating from Guardian IV to Archon III, the highest rank that I had been able to achieve since 2013. As long as I maintain a 50% win rate, I wold inevitably make my gains over time.
•I started playing meta heroes like a soulless mimic. As a natural contrarian, I used to play heroes I was comfortable with even if they were not considered good. Well, I learned a couple of meta heroes—Naga Siren and Phantom Lancer—and learned to enjoy them. Well, at least Naga, anyway.
•I hired a coach. Or to be more accurate, a smurf beat down my mates and me like, 35 kills and 2 deaths. Then they had the audacity to send us friend requests. I replied something to the effect of “I would rather delete my account than to play with a smurf.” Then I became curious, because most people have passively aggressively grief me, but here, this person was offering an olive branch to someone named “Black Lives Matter.” I asked them why they sent a friend request, and they were like, “Wanna gain MMR? I will show you.” And so began my live coaching sessions at 8:00 PM EST on Sundays, because that is 8:00 AM from the Philippines, where my newfound friend lives. Now I have a coach who tells me to rush bfly instead of manta on PL, or tells me to go shadow blade on Naga to kill an enemy Axe.
I learned more with a coach in a few months than I had in years of grinding solo. I am not even sure if my coach is the same person as they play from an internet cafe at $1/hr and they use different accounts.
At any rate, I am hardly interested in playing ranked anymore now that I have reached the goal of where I wanted to be.
I am content.
I have achieved peace.
I never thought I would ever say that about DotA 2, but here I am!
Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You
As the name entails, Orwell is inspired by George Orwell’s 1984. Imagine working for the Ministry of Truth, having access to the world wide web, cameras of all sorts, and personal computers. In a scenario reminiscent of Minority Report, in an anti-terrorist effort, one must sort through digital publications, internet blogs, photographs, and the like in order to anticipate, prevent and investigate terrorist goings-on within a nation-state not unlike Oceania.
I played through the first two days/chapters of Orwell, somehow oblivious to the subliminal messaging. Like a peon, I submitted critical information to the Powers That Be acted upon, resulting in a fatality that I think could have been prevented. I felt so bad about it that I actually stopped playing the game. I do intend to finish it, but I feel like the game has already made its point. So am I supposed to continue and see the consequences of my choices all the way through? What if I take a queue from The Stanley Parable where there is an achievement for not playing the game for ten years?
8/10
This War of Mine
Despite all the awards that This War of Mine has won, it is another game that I did not finish. I gave it the ol’ college try, until Pavle out of my starting trio of characters decided to remain “slightly sick” no mater how much medicine and bedrest I gave him. Meds are expensive in this game, man. Highest trade value next to weapons!
I also sent Katia out to scavenge, cheating by reading the possible encounters I would experience at certain locations. I sent her to a hotel, expecting resistance. Since I only had a blunt weapon, I could not backstab, but I beat a thug to death. His friends came along, and I tried to arm myself with an automatic weapon, but This War of Mine is not exactly the kind of game where a regular smegular person becomes a living weapon like in the movies; using arms with civilians is supposed to feel ungainly. The thug blew her away, and as the game was loading back to the hideout, I cheated by hard resetting my Steam Deck.
This is a game that is good at what it is supposed to do. Yo, I am black man living in the United States; I would rather not experience what it might feel like to be in the middle of the Bosnian War, or present-day Ukraine.
7/10
Oxygen Not Included
I figure I would sandwich the two games I have been actively playing between the new titles. In last month’s Backloggery Beatdown, I mention that I had attained homeostasis on my main colony, which has the Spaced Out! DLC activated, but I engaged with little content besides large quantities of cobalt and lead–material that I do not remember from the core game.
I decided to begin my space program, and whew, my goodness I was not prepared for the scope of how much ONI can become a time sink; that is even taking into consideration 3-hr publications of ONI gameplay on YouTube! At any rate, I am committed to discovering and traveling to the temporal tear. ONI has become in order to reach the temporal tear, which I have yet to discover.
Nevertheless, I have a rotation of two rockets, one for research and exploration, and the other for colonization. I tried to colonize the volcano planetoid, but I could land neither my rover nor my trailblazer module because I forgot to allow my dupes to finish pre-loading them before launching my rocket. So I had to go back, putting my mission behind for a few cycles.
Meanwhile, on the initial planetoid that I found, I decided to farm Beetas for no other reason than because I could. I do not plan to make a nuclear reactor to utilize the enriched uranium that the Beetas produce.
What I really want to do is figure out how to make berry sludge for space missions because it does not expire while out on long space missions. However, cooked seafood provides radiation resistance while in space yet requires energy. Nevertheless, berry sludge would be a milestone for me. Unfortunately, this requires sleet wheat, which must be grown and irrigated in temperatures below 0 Celsius. I have tried to bring the sleet wheat back to my home planetoid, and the results have been disastrous in both a cold biome as well as space. I am hoping that bristle berry farm will be more successful.
UPDATE AS I TYPE THIS!
So, I totally did not take into consideration that on this trip, one of my top dupes would not make it back home after scrubbing an asteroid for materials due to the weight.
Welp, I have to send my colonization rocket to meet them halfway just to land their rockets and then I will figure out how to get them and the materials back home. Stay tuned, I suppose!
Blerd Beats 
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