Was def nice to go 4/0 for the night including 3 ranked wins anyway.  Gotta say I was pretty pleased with how I did as nidalee last night.  Went 8/2/5 in game 1 (vs a plat 3 vayne) and 5/0/2 in game 2 (vs baddy mcbad gold V syndra).  1st off, I floated around 140-160 ping for most of the night.  Made last hitting mechanics a little more difficult, but I kept pace in both games at least. 

I'm really enjoying trying to figure out the best way to handle various opponents in lane.  That irelia from the other night is still the toughest nut to crack for me as I'm not sure how best to trade.  It might come down to just trying to keep up aaing her and then sucking up some damage when she lunges forward then slows and perhaps try to get a trap underneath myself whens he does that so I can trade at higher dmg.  Haven't got a chance to try that out.

Vayne was a little annoying to figure out.  My opponent was particularly good at always landing an aa anytime I moved up to get an aa on her during laning.  This meant that her trade potential went way up as she'd position herself behind her creeps very well.  So, I couldn't follow up with a spear and if I tried to do anything keeping with that aggressive posture, she'd land 3 hits and I'd end up a bit more chunked/unsafe for the next fight.  Anyway, she did a good job dictating the pace of the lane and didn't make a ton of mistakes.  That said, the moment she'd try to go for an all in (eg run past the creeps to try to get meh), I'd go for a spear which hits and then run my burst combo.  This resets our posture to some degree as I'm chunked a bit and she is as well. 

She made some really aggressive attempts to try to kill me, but I managed to get out safely for the most part.  Having tp meant that if that happened, I'd just heal and port back with very little loss.  Now, where I outplayed the crap out of her is what I'm proud of.  I had multiple instances where I used brief vision outages to reset my positioning, hunt procs, and cooldowns. I had at least 4-5 kills last night where I was low and picked up kills due to outplaying folks. 

re: syndra v nid matchup.  Syndra has nice wave clear, but cannot fight you up and close.  You just bide for your time for a little bit. Stay mobile while you are csing and poke as possible.  Once I figured out her pattern, I started to just walk towards her at an angle so there would be no creep wave between us and forced her into bad spots.  I think I went dorans, phage, boots and then merc treads immediately to mitigate dmg/cc so I could easily all in.  Nid's big adv vs syndra is her mobility.  You just hop over her, stay close and keep moving around and you can avoid the cc pretty easily when you engage.  And if she doesn't land much on you, her ult can't take you out. 

anyway, I'm learning quite a bit and have a ton to learn.  So far I've played vs jax/rene/irel/synd/vayne... off the top of my head.  The only one that gave me problems re: figuring out trades was irel. 

I wont be around until Monday night. I am going on a small vacation. Feel free to play ranked games of Twisted Treeline or 5's without me. I think we have enough people that know how to play twisted treeline now that people could play it without me *cough* Brad, Karl, bryff, pacov *cough*. Have a nice 4th of July weekend everyone!

k - streaming now - about to try out the new game mode on pbe 

I tried out both of the new mecha skins:  malph and aatrox.  Both looked really good.  I really liked the malphite skin.  When your armor shield is active, you are the color blue.  When it is off, you turn reddish orange.  When you press your w, there's a brass knuckle (more or less) animation that is added.  The animation is a bit long I think, but its cool.  When he presses b, he turns into a drill and drills back to base.  His skin looks really, really good imo. 

Here's a link to the malphite game I played where I checked out all his animations, etc: http://www.twitch.tv/1pacov1/c/4589193

I enjoy playing on my level 30 smurf account when I'm not stomping so bad that I don't feel good about it or when my allies are so bad that it doesn't matter how fed I get.  It's fun to play games where you're almost guaranteed to be the best player in the game cause it forces you to remember that when you have all the teams gold, you have to play carefully.  It's also great to be able to unlock champs again!

But no, leveling up smurf account is just a chore I did cause a few old high school buds of mine got into the game at the same time.  I can't stand being in games where I don't have as many runes an masteries as I normally would, feels like it totally throws me off for when I play a regular game.  Why play to make yourself worse?

things I say on lan that might mean what I think: cualquier cosa menos de la selva

Anywhere but jungle = nidalee low lev

got in some games with dr karl tonight.  Not super fun for either of us.  We laughed it off, but were playing with a few so so folks (one that wanted to jungle and the other that wanted to support).  Went about how I thought it would. A bunch of people dropped for the last lobby except  karl/pacov/level 19 player.  I decided to call it a night to give karl an out (figured the last game would be the same stuff).  Anyway, really nice fellas we met with the exception of the super talkative guy that wanted to be called mam or something that karl eventually pissed off enough to get them to leave the chat.  hue. 

Yep!

Heard about Victorious Gaming tournaments recently, max capacity of 1600 players each sorted out by MMR.  

Top 20% attending = Division A etc. all the way down to Division E (bottom 20%).

Tournaments are held every day by the community at I believe 3 or 4 PM PST.  

Today was a special day though, I guess Turtle Beach sponsored the event, and in lieu of the whole normal prizing by Riot, (3200 RP for winning team + Triumphant Ryze), then 2400, 1600, 800 etc. They tacked on Turtle Beach Z22 Headphones.  

So because there are 5 different divisions, that means that there are 5 different winning teams = 25 headsets and so on and so forth. The prizing each day is 200k RP in total by Riot.

The community's TS has some nifty tools that they made to sort out the players into their corresponding MMRs etc, you just pretty much have to be there in the TS and the tools do everything for you for the most part, you will understand if you partake.

But yeah, happened to get paired up with 3 pretty cool people (our 4th was kind of a booty the first game but didn't talk too much after our first game). 

Here's my bracket, http://organizers.challonge.com/e11guv7f. I was on team a31.

And we placed 3rd after a grueling 6 long games. If we didn't lose our 5th game we would've been in the finals. Afterwards, we played the other losing team from the semi-finals for the 3rd place position and we snagged it.

These were really challenging games overall and I feel as though it may help you progress as a player since it matches you up randomly with people of similar MMR hence the multiple divisions.

But yeah, in response to the whole http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/29y0oy/never_again_will_i_play_for_a_victoriousgaming/ hullabaloo on reddit. 

The OP is supposed to have the same exact name in TS as he does in League. My IGN is DanKnee, so my TS for them should be DanKnee. However the site has some clever registration shenanigans so that your TS name upon registration is bound to your League of Legends account. So I go to the website and put my League ID (DanKnee), I must log into TS to confirm that I am DanKnee in TS and it links it to your League account or whatever. However, what the guy did was probably linked his account so for example if his League name was like HotshotGG, he would have to go on TS and put his ID HotshotGG so the tool confirms or something. So after this happened, what I think the OP did as he confesses is changes his name to HeartBeat or whatever who happens to be a Challenger player and kept that name in the Victorious Gaming TS (his League ID is obviously different). He coincidentally does really well as ADC in a C or something bracket and people were curious about why his IGN was different from his TS. (Remember his MMR was set when he registered for the site, so his name could've been like DanKnee (me) and then later changed his name in TS) which he shouldn't have done in the first place if he had read the rules initially. Your League name should be the same as your TS name which he didn't follow. So then the higher-ups talked to him about the whole thing, but the people in charge of the site in general are mostly volunteers, and of course there would be some bad eggs, and the dude got the short end of the stick. So I just think it's both sides at fault honestly. But the whole circlejerk on reddit is giving the site a really bad rep. Compared to other tournaments VG allows the opportunity for anyone the equal chance to earn RP etc.

http://www.victoriousgaming.com/

Is the website ^.

TL;DR, Honestly, the tournaments are pretty damn nice for what they are. Dude didn't abide by their rules, and as a result happened to get paired up with admins or whatever who happened to be very unprofessional and crude etc.

I'm going to bed now, but wtf karls.  I let you off the hook at midnight and here you are putzing about on the forums. How dare you.  Create a LAN account already to blow off steam.

I reads em tomorrow.

edit - re-read dan's comment = pacovs note to self.  Want to talk about that.   Beat me to the punch and discuss!

I am almost sad that I missed out on this "mam" guy. Sounds like a real winner. 

So - these tourneys - how much of a time commitment are you putting in?  How did you guys decide on roles?  How much of a hassle to make it happen? 

Walk me through it a little bit more if you have the time.  Let's say I want to play in a tourney today.  Is that possible as a brand new person to the site?  Do I have to just wait around and not do anything else to participate?  Etc

Thanks!

We probably won't be seeing him again.  I think I played with him during a MC in house game where he was either on the other team or didn't run his mouth quite as much, so I gave him an invite to a game the other night.  That won't be happening again. 

Still putting in some time on my LAN account.  I keep coming across more and more folks from the US now.  Makes me wonder if they are grouping us together to some degree.  Anyway, I'm still enjoying my time on LAN and still certainly liking the ping quite a bit more than on NA.  Nice to have options at any rate. 

I'll pop on NA tonight and see if folks are around; otherwise, I'll probably hop back over to LAN.  I'm just about due to get back into playing solo queue ranked on NA.  Been a few weeks since my last game I think and I'd rather not toy with things if people are getting demoted in less than 30 days.  I would be a bit pissed.  Just checked in on karl's progress (he was plat V and got demoted early to gold I).  He's currently in his promo series back to Plat V, but its 1/2 atm (best of 5).  Good luck!