Ilandar

The invite only thing doesn't really mean anything in practice, though. I think it was more hype generation from Valve than anything else and if you check the Steam discussion page for the game it's just filled with endless threads of people giving away invites. Currently Deadlock has a 96,000 24 hour peak on Steam, putting it in the top 15 games being played on the platform and its all time peak is 171,000 from a month ago. There are definitely enough people in the pool for balancing to be possible.

I think the newness is leaving match making for people who would be in what ever tier I exist in a weird place of either being rolled or rolling most of the time.

This is a super common complaint from what I've seen, so I suspect maybe matchmaking just isn't very optimised right now. I've found that most of my matches are actually very close but there is wild imbalance between players in a match. Like you'll have one team with 3 people who go 2/12 or something and then another guy on the same team going 24/2 with a couple of other teammates somewhere in the middle.

I think another common problem for some people is that they consistently lose their lanes either because they don't understand the soul mechanics or they lack FPS mechanical skill and struggle with positioning and aim in an early 1v1. And because they're new, they don't understand the mid-game mechanics enough to realise that there are ways to catch up after a bad laning phase by playing smarter and more defensive. Instead they keep trying to push aggressively or join team fights and endlessly feed as the power gap grows larger and larger. If you are that far behind and repeatedly dying then it can feel like a game is less even than it actually is.

I don't know about the rest of Australia, but that's not really the case in Adelaide. There is a pretty strong cycling culture here and a lot of proper bike stores for commuters, road cyclists and mountain bikers. Hosting the Tour Down Under for 25 years has really helped with that. But for whatever reason the government has never really invested in infrastructure that would help.daily commuters.

My guess as to the "why" is that it's just another example of enshittification. Podcasts were essentially a bubble that everyone was trying to get in on, but the amount of low quality (not just production but also content) flooding the market devalued it significantly and listeners and subscriptions began declining. Everyone is trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of it now, which means there are even more ads on top of all the ads and cross-promotion that come baked into an episode.

Cycling infrastructure development in Adelaide and SA always seems to be based around tourism and leisure. Like if you want to do a family day trip, or you're here on a cycling holiday or just want to spend your day somewhere there are quite a few good cycling paths that all connect up with minimal need to cross or ride on roads. But the daily cycling infrastructure is absolutely terrible. Most "bike lanes" on suburban roads are narrow, damaged and filled with rubbish and many motorists do not respect them at all. Thankfully we are allowed to ride on the footpaths so that reduces the danger somewhat but it's also pretty inconvenient since footpaths are even less consistent in terms of terrain.

She can be pretty tough to deal with but I do think at the lower levels a lot of players just feed her due to their bad positioning/game awareness. I play a lot of Vindicta myself and most of my kills, particularly earlier in the game, come from picking off players who over-extend or aren't paying attention to the mini-map. I had a match the other day where the enemy Vindicta ended up with 28 kills and an insane souls lead because 3 players on my team were repeatedly going deep on their lanes despite a souls deficit. I don't think I died to her once and the rest of their team was beatable, but these guys on my team fed so hard that the Vindicta became a nightmare to deal with late in the game.

The biggest thing I miss about SMNC was the "sports on TV" theme.

Have you played The Finals? That has a very similar theme. There was another FPS game in development called Combat Champions that also trying to do this but it was cancelled before ever making it to release.

This is a pretty clickbaity counter-article that doesn't review the original in good faith. The New Yorker article is not titled 'Social Media Is Killing Kids' but rather 'Has Social Media Fuelled A Teen-Suicide Crisis?' with a lead of:

Mental-health struggles have risen sharply among young Americans, and parents and lawmakers alike are scrutinizing life online for answers.

So the implication that the premise of the article is to demonise social media is completely wrong, since it's actually an investigation into the issue. That's also the reason it's long (another strange complaint from a guy whose 3000+ word response is only ever his opinions).

The "moral panic tropes" are testimony from real parents whose real children killed themselves. And these real parents think social media was responsible. It strikes me as pretty low to hand wave away the grief of these real people because it inconveniently feeds into a narrative you have some instinctual problem with.

The author tries to frame the balance of the New Yorker article as some kind of gotcha. Like it's somehow a bad thing that this other writer took the time to consult with and quote experts who provide a different opinion. Personally I would much rather read that then something like this which was basically the equivalent of a reddit eXpOsEd thread.

Well it is still a very new game so I think the fact that there are so many noobs and non-MOBA players is helping with that. But yeah, there are a lot of quality of life improvements and enjoyable mechanics front loaded into the experience so it doesn't have that usual MOBA barrier of boring/wildly inefficient gameplay for beginners. You don't need to have a lot of learning or in-game experience to have fun and feel like you know what is happening in a match.

The game wasn't on my radar either. I only played it because some of my old PlanetSide 2 outfit mates were running a 6v6 training night and invited me to join. They assured me I'd be fine because of my ability as an FPS player but they completely underestimated how little I knew about MOBAs (I didn't even know this game was a MOBA, I have basically never played the genre previously because I find it so uninteresting).

I got absolutely destroyed and thought about uninstalling but decided to give it another week of play by myself and put some time into learning the basics. I'm really glad I did, it has been unexpectedly enjoyable and something really different. I am a large scale shooter (PlanetSide, Battlefield, etc) player primarily and the state of that sub-genre is absolutely dire, so it has been so revitalising to actually find something fun which also feels like it has a future.

So I think it’s possible he’s using the opportunity of legal action to generate publicity for the issue.

Yes I did actually think this as well, interesting way to keep it in the news cycle. This story had pretty much died off until now.

None of these games had as many shooter elements as Deadlock. Like the maps were all just generic wide open MOBA lanes seen from a third person angle, whereas Deadlock's map has tons of cover so the positioning skills you learn as an FPS player can actually translate, particularly in the laning phase. Movement is also way more shooter-reminiscent, in that every character has stamina and universal movement mechanics with a high skill ceiling. A lot of these other third person MOBAs only had movement mechanics built into the hero, at all other times it was fairly basic. The reason why FPS players like myself ignored all those other games is because they were just MOBAs with a different camera angle. Mechanically they were still boring as fuck to play, whereas Deadlock actually has very fun shooter mechanics that are the hook that can get players like myself in and learning all the "boring" but very important MOBA parts.

EDIT: Not arguing with you by the way, just piggybacking off your comment to further explain why this game is different to everything else that came before it.