Tag: gaming

[Flesh and Blood] Living Legend Leaderboard data analysis – Blitz!

(Note: This is a follow-up to my previous post that discussed the Living Legend points of heroes in the Flesh and Blood TCG. That post looked at the Classic Constructed LL leaderboard – this one focusses on the Blitz LL leaderboard)

Classic Constructed is the most popular competitive format for Flesh and Blood TCG, but there are others too – Blitz, Living Legend, Commoner, etc. Blitz is a commonly played faster format that uses Young versions of heroes with 20 life instead of 40 life and decks that have a minimum of 40 cards (unlike CC’s 60), and is the only other format that has a Living Legend system where heroes rotate out of play (when they reach 500 LL points, though this has changed recently). It should be noted that at the time of writing there are heroes that only exist in Young form (such as Terra, Kavdaen, Blaze and Emperor) and so are only legal to play in Blitz.

Young vs Adult Heroes (Azalea)

The Blitz graphs are more straightforward than in Classic Constructed. For one thing, there are fewer data points here because the Blitz leaderboard is updated less frequently – Blitz is generally only played competitively at side events and Skirmishes.

Blitz graphs for all Young Heroes.

Traditionally heroes rotated out of play in Blitz at 500 points but recently this was (somewhat clumsily) adjusted by LSS to prevent Zen from retiring so quickly after he went from 205 to 505 points in one week! As a result, in November 2024 LSS decided to raise the Blitz LL limit to 1000 points and double every Hero’s point except Zen’s, who now found himself back in the middle of the pack again. This adjustment would have appeared as a sudden discontinuity in these graphs, so I made my own adjustment to keep things visually consistent – when all of the official points doubled, I halved them back down again so they remained consistent with their previous scores, and also I retroactively halved all of Zen’s scores since his introduction. This means that the Blitz LL limit on this graph remains at 500 points (even though it’s officially be 1000 now).

What is interesting in Blitz is that there is no obvious “Mistveil Effect” (seen in CC, where most of the heroes’ scores flatten out in May 2024 when Part the Mistveil was released) – instead it looks like heroes jump in points when other heroes retire. e.g. at the end of Dec 2023 Chane, Kano, Ira and Kassai (Sellsword) all reached LL within a month of eachother and many of the other heroes gain a lot of points immediately after that, presumably because they started winning events once those heroes left. This appears to happen again later when Dash, Briar and Rhinar all rotated out within a couple of weeks of eachother in Aug 2024.

I won’t go over each class individually this time, I’ll just present the graphs below (Blitz excel sheet is posted below too for anyone who wants to look at the data). Assassins and Rangers seem to be the classes that struggle most in Blitz, with none above 150 points. Many of the other classes have a couple of heroes who do really well while the rest linger around the lower end of the leaderboard (this is particularly noticeable in Mechanologists, where the original Dash was quite successful but all the other Mechanologists have less than 100 points). I haven’t shown the minor Blitz-only classes here (Bard, Merchant, Shapeshifter) because they don’t really have any support and haven’t won many games – Melody (Bard) and Genis (Merchant) each have 0 points, Kavdaen (Merchant) has a single point, and Shiyana (the only Shapeshifter) has 22 points. I’ve included Emperor (the only Warrior-Wizard) with the Wizards – he is doing fairly well (despite being dead :D) considering he is a hard-to-find character with Legendary rarity (like Shiyana).

Assassin, Brute, Guardian, Illusionist
Mechanologist, Ninja, Ranger, Runeblade
Warrior, Wizard

Full dataset: final_LL_table_for_Blitz_25Feb2025

Please let me know if you have any further comments or observations!

[Battletech] Advanced Rules: Realistic Mech Movement

In my last post I showed how most Battlemechs couldn’t actually walk as fast as described in the game – if you missed that then you can read it at How fast can a Battlemech walk?. In this post I will present some optional Advanced Rules to implement the more realistic mech movement described there.

This is what I’m setting out to achieve here:

– Mechs now walk, run, and sprint at realistic speeds.
– Where possible, movement rates should be as consistent as possible with their current stats. That said, the fastest mechs must be slower here because it’s now impossible for them to be as fast as they were – this means they will have smaller engines and more space for equipment.
– It must be possible to design mechs so that their engine ratings (and gyros) are comparable with published designs.
– MASC, Superchargers and TSM will have a similar effect on speed as in the existing rules.
Continue reading

[Battletech] How fast can a Battlemech walk?

A good demonstration of how a Locust doesn’t walk! 🙂

Or: “Can a Locust Battlemech really walk 240m in only 10 seconds?”

The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is “no, it can’t” – a Locust (or indeed any battlemech) could run that far in that time… but it is actually physically impossible for it to walk 240m in 10 seconds (at least in gravity similar to Earth’s). To discover why, we must take a rather fascinating scientific journey that sheds some light on something that perhaps many of us take for granted – the mechanics of how we move on two legs! Read on to learn more…
Continue reading

Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture – full playthrough

I’ve posted a full playthrough of Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture on Youtube! I hope you take a look at it, it’s a fantastic story with great characters, beautiful graphics and an amazing soundtrack! If you enjoy watching it then I’d love to hear what you think in the comments, and please do like the videos and subscribe to my Youtube channel!

Episode 1: Quarantine: find out what happens to the inhabitants of the sleepy English village of Yaughton as they are visited by an unearthly force far beyond their understanding!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pq7kW7lB8U

Continue reading

[Elite Dangerous] First Stream is now online!

And now for something completely different – I have started streaming! I now have my very own Twitch page at https://www.twitch.tv/evildrganymede and I’ll be streaming Elite Dangerous there on a semi-regular basis (check the twitch page or my twitter for updates)!

I’ve already finished my first stream this evening, and you can now see the whole thing on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i94h6R1x8wk . Highlights include a few neutron star boosts, finding a moon that orbited very close to the edge of its gas giant primary’s ring system, and a big landable icy planet. Plus an explanation about how planetary rings work, and a few rants about the inaccuracies of Elite Dangerous :).

Elite Dangerous 21Feb2017 stream

So if you’d like to join me as I explore the galaxy in Elite Dangerous, please check out the twitch page and videos and Follow me there to be notified about when I’ll be streaming again!