Ramble for #Blaugust Day 10 – Overwatch, Suicide Squad, and Pokémon

Overwatch March

This morning started my push to get to ranked play for season one of Overwatch. I think I did relatively well winning two out of the five games that I played and I made it to level five – just a game away from attaining level 6.

As per my usual tendencies, I’ve decided to go the healing route and Lucio is my primary champ right now and actually I’ve only played him so far. The fact that he has a passive healing ability makes it easier to focus on trying to stay alive rather than having to target heal my teammates. So in essence my entire gameplay has been focused on trying to keep that little number in the center of the screen at the highest possible value – preferably five but more likely four or three. At this point I’m pretty happy when I get above 4500 healing in a match, and anything below 3000 and it seems that we lose.

Matchmaking?

So far in the few games I’ve played the skill levels or rather the player levels of my teammates and the opponents seem to vary pretty widely. I’ve been up against teams that have had two or three champions above level 30 while my team is all in the teens or like me – in single digits. I’ve also had games where I’ve been the only one in single digits and everybody’s been in the 20s to 40s range. So I’m not really sure how blizzard is doing their matchmaking. I suppose if they’re doing an ELO type of thing then sure there could be people at level 32 are just really bad players along with people at level 10 that have won all their games. It just seems a bit off putting to see a level 40 player that I’m up against at level 5.

One More Thought on Suicide Squad

What was up with the bad guys? In most stories that involve heroes or at least bad guys who are playing at being heroes, the quality of a hero is hugely influenced by the quality of the bad guy. Enchantress seemed like a cool idea but she was just that – an idea. She wants to build a machine…to do what exactly? She’s not gonna make people worship her like supposedly they did in previous times, she’s gonna kill everyone? Or she’s gonna build a machine to destroy armies? I’m not really sure.

With a name like Enchantress, I would have expected she would do some kind of magic rather than “make a machine”. She seemed to be able to manipulate people’s minds to make them see things, she could teleport, she obviously could turn people into faceless minions, but her goal is to make some kind of machine which looked like – I believe it was Deadshot who said it best – a bunch of floating trash. She just seemed like a mash up between Scarlet Witch and Night Crawler and I just feel she needed to be fleshed out a bit better to provide a decent opponent for Task Force X.

Why does DC and Warner Brothers try making movies with such a bad stories? Put some interesting characters into a good story and people will like it a whole lot more. They’ll even forgive the music videos if the rest of the story is good.

Vanishing Pokéstops

Wow…I knew there was an update to the Pokémon Go app, but this is pretty crazy. I was pretty happy when the game came out, that I have a few Pokéstops and a gym near my work. I could head over to the break room and pick up some coffee and grab a pokéball or a razz berry or whatever. I could take a little walk and catch a bunch of Pokémon – typically Rattatas and Pidgeys and see who was controlling the nearby gym. But today, I fired up the app and things appear to be a barren wasteland. I took my usual mile long walk – measured by my Garmin Fenix 3 – around the work neighborhood this morning and found not a thing. The Pokéstops were all gone, the Gym disappeared, and I did not see ONE Pokémon. Sure the app showed I walked around the area but it did not even add any distance toward hatching any of my 3 incubating eggs. I restarted the app, I rebooted my phone, I even installed the update that I was gonna wait till I got home to download, but nothing has brought back any Poké anything. The app still works to transfer Pokémon I’ve previously caught, but everything else seems to be dead – nothing even shows up in the Nearby window. So now I guess I have a crappy mapping app that uses too much battery until Niantic fixes whatever is wrong – and I thought they had worked out the problems a couple weeks ago.