jstout

Potentially useful stuff in the equipment section. 11-wave gold strike team is back, and it's a bear. Three randoms and I barely got through it because we were coordinating movements over the mics. That was awesome. Also awesome - last night, me and a 25,000 APEX duoed six waves of gold Kett before being joined by someone in the seventh. And of course, I lost my connection somehow and got booted out of the game. He was slick with that Avenger - gave me some ideas.

I can't honestly believe how NJPW bills - if I signed up today, I'd pay $9.99 for July (all five days of it), then pay $9.99 again on August 1. Uh, no thanks, I'll start on the 1st.

I gotta admit, I was scared Drack would kick my ass.

I buy Reserve packs (greater chance of characters) and get nothing but rare guns and rare gun variants now that I've got all the rare characters up to XX. Premium packs would give me a better chance at an N7, but would also increase the chance that the N7s I do get are guns instead of characters. I could do fine never getting another gun, don't shoot them enough to care.

Tree-mendous. Got to play three games this afternoon with the No. 5 guy on the XBox APEX rankings (40,000-plus). That was fun. We kept doing a gold remnant APEX mission with weakened strike teams, but by the third one, I didn't even have to use a first aid or revive. It was three of us who had that shit and one who drug behind, but since it was just one, it was easy to keep up with reviving him. Good times. I'm usually on constantly on Tuesdays and Wednesdays - getting the avenger to X has become an obsession I need to back away from, but I just don't.

I was on starting at about 1 a.m. after a long night at work. I had these 3 randoms last night, all of them over 10,000 APEX, one higher than me at 20,000, all playing level 20 characters in gold. I thought "we got this shit" until we started playing and it was obvious we didn't. They proceeded to get killed one after the other at a frightening pace. I felt like sitting them down like kids at one point and saying "Uncle Stout has to get these devices. You be good and stay here and revive each other until I get back."

Yep, as per usual, the ultra-rare leveled up a character I will probably never use.

Sea Rug, Bob and That's Amore. I was on public chat today giving a youngun some tips on playing the Avenger, and it was One Life to Live and I died twice. Bet he was thinking "try staying alive before dishing out advice." Never got to tell him the Avenger is like the Kroguard - if you shoot a gun at all, you're not playing it right. Actually, I do use a gun to try to wipe out the Ascendant's Orb. But that's it.

Well, y'all go, then. And I don't need this stuff and I don't need you. I don't need anything. Except this. And that's the only thing I need is this. I don't need this or this, just this ashtray and this paddle game ...

Damn quitters. Did Tully Blanchard quit against Magnum TA? Come on!

You know all eyes are going to be on Anthem from the start to see if Bioware-EA can recover from the sin of putting out a perfectly fine, though flawed, game. And Dragon, you get your ass back to Andromeda. Less randoms, more talented players equals happier Stout. We have critters to dominate.

One of the big things I hate about how the diminishing of the player base affects multiplayer is how damn hard it is to find four for a game sometimes. This causes players to take on "project" teammates they wouldn't take on if there was a healthy group of players to pick from. For example, the one BIG thing that bugs me about this game is people playing outside of their character's level. The game spells it out for you in black and white: Levels 1-9: play bronze; Levels 10-17, play silver; Levels 18-20, play gold. How hard is this shit? I don't really give a flying dammit what a player's APEX rating is, if he's in gold with a Level 11 character, he either needs to pick a character with a higher level (which you know the player possesses), or take the Level 11 character down to silver. I also got to thinking last night with Melraz about strategy. I'm of the opinion that strategy is mainly useless in bronze-gold, depending on what character you're playing. Just try to not get too separated from each other so nobody has to travel so far to rescue your sorry ass when you die 2000 times and everything's cool. I have a feeling strategy is everything in platinum, but I'm talking bronze-gold here. Anyhoo, as soon as I got done telling him that strategy is pretty useless, I started telling him to "hang back here with us" on Firebase Zero, the only map that seems to have a clear-cut strategy everyone has hit upon and decided to use. You jam the back and bash forward when they come in. Pure gunners stand back and shoot the copious amount of targets. Easy peasy. Which got me thinking about the whole easy way to do uploads and hacks thing. The funny thing about strategy in this game is its usefulness is dependent on who you're playing with. Let's say I'm on the mic with three randoms. Let's say hack comes up and I tell 'em that I'll cloak and get it, just run around killing like in any other wave and stay away from me. What's the chances they're gonna do what I say? "This guy thinks he knows it all, screw him."

So, I hop into the middle of a random bunch's game, and it's Wave 4. Everyone is in the back of the starbase map when I spawn in. I proceed to head that way, stopping for some knife-based chats with the unfriendlies along the way, right? At the end of the wave, I get a message from the host. I figure it was thanks, or welcome to the game, or whatever. Nope. "If you're going to play solo in a multiplayer game, go play Minecraft." I proceeded to stick back with everyone else and just dominated Wave 5. The stars were in alignment. At the end of that wave, I texted "LOL." Trust me, junior, I got this shit.

Deal I wanted to make with my teammates this afternoon, who were amazingly competent at two things: dying and being carried by me: "OK, boys, you run around, die and revive each other while I take care of the important stuff like this Retrieval." Also, I realize this puts me at 0.2 on the J.T. Andromeda Manliness Scale, but I'm not even bothering to try One Life to Live (no revives) on Gold with randoms. Life's too short. Send out the strike team.

Just got done playing a few before work, and I'm on a (knock on wood) lucky streak of talented, take-no-shit randoms with higher APEX ratings than mine. Even the low guy was more than holding his own, and no one died maybe more than twice doing remnant on gold. Got a "good game" message from one of them afterward, so I'm a good boy. It was assault rifle skirmishes, but I kept my shotgun because I want that 33 percent increase on melee damage more than the 50 percent increase on a gun I shoot once or twice during a match, maybe.

Love combotastic bronze so the Asari Adept can ride roughshod. We did the new map with the melee bonus with two Kroguards and two Angaran Avengers. That was fun. Played with a guy who was great with the kineticist - outlaw were flying everywhere. I just kinda stood there and watched.

New map's out in multiplayer as an APEX mission. It's wide and long, and it's very easy to be shot from who knows were. One of the new "vests" in the store gives you plus-20 biotic powers and plus-15 melee, making it perfect for the Kroguard.

Yeah, Leonard said they're not editing the show. I wonder how many house shows Del Rio will have to miss? Oh yeah, forgot. Wonder what the response would be if they didn't have two months worth of TV in the can? Ah, wrestling, stay sleazy.

Adrian Street was a face occasionally in the South in the 1980s. That's even more astonishing. Charisma rises over everything, I think. If someone's charismatic, he's easy enough to like no matter what the character.

His promo tonight was absolutely fantastic, one of the best I've seen in a while. I thought he was a decent talker, but I worried he was all catchphrases. Nope. He nailed it.

I do know that there's no skin tones available if your character wears a helmet.

Yep, skin tones were added last update. Don't know where to even find the adjustments, don't care.

I swear, every time I think "this random's got a pretty good APEX rating and a decent character, he'll be fine," I get "rewarded" by that person dying 400 times. If you're going to die 500 times in a match, that's fine, but you better be walking out of there with no first aids or any revives or you're cheating everyone around you because you're being a stingy-ass.

Interesting to see someone else got stuck under those stairs. I gave up long before wave 5, figured my teammates would rather play with someone who wasn't stuck in Magma Prison. I'd never tinkered around with him before for some stupid reason, but the Krogan Vanguard is fun and effective. He's breezing his way through Bronze, and I'm ready to take him up a notch to see how he fares in Silver. He's a ton like my Angara, except the controls are flipped, which causes problems. Just played a Bronze with randoms where apparently, I was designated Devices guy, except nobody told me. People closer than me moved away from it while I struggled to get there with lots of enemies in the way. Thing you may not know: Even if you're in the middle of messing with the device (pressing the Y button), if the timer expires, you're done.

I got the Batarian ridiculously early, very soon after it came out. I don't have everything (missing a lot of guns), but was doing pretty well on characters. I think Melraz has a Batarian also. Fun melee.