Category: Uncategorized

Knockout City

Knockout City is an interesting dodgeball brawler that feels hobbled by it’s secondary systems and menus.

The core gameplay of Knockout City is pretty good. I’m not an expert, or even anywhere past the bronze silver rank, but at least for me it feels straightforward and easy to enjoy. Unfortunately the same can’t be said about the non-gameplay elements.

Knockout City is an action-brawler, themed around dodgeball. The game itself is free, but it contains microtransactions. I’ll talk more about those later. The short version is they’re all cosmetic. There are no gameplay advantages you can buy. Anyway, back to the actual game.

There are multiple game modes, including 1v1 and 3v3. I’m going to focus on the 3v3 mode for this writeup, since it’s the gamemode played in ranked.

Core Gameplay

A game of Knockout City consists of two teams playing to best of 3 rounds. Each round is first to 10 points. You get a point whenever an opposing player is knocked out. This can be from them falling off a ledge, being hit by an obstacle, or running out of health from being smacked with dodgeballs.

Dodgeballs are the heart of Knockout City. It is, after all, a dodgeball game. They’re scattered around the arena. You can run over them to pick them up, and tossing them requires you to charge. They’re not really physics projectiles. Instead, they lock onto the target you’re focused at, and will head toward that target. There are three throw patterns, a straight shot, a lob, and shot that can be curved around walls. These throws are executed by tapping the input keys as part of a double jump.

On the flip side, if you’re having a dodgeball thrown at you, all you need to do is hit right click right before it impacts you while facing the ball to catch it. You can then throw it back immediately if you want.

While it might seem like this would lead to an infinite Zelda boss fight situation of launching projectiles back and fourth forever, let me introduce the intensity mechanic. Intensity is built on a ball by readying a throw, and also when balls are caught. Higher intensity balls travel faster. The ball will move quicker and quicker with each toss and catch, preventing you from getting stuck n a loop.

There are a bunch of other clever mechanics as well. You and your teammate can’t find a dodgeball? You can roll up and get passed the ball by your teammate. The inputs for choosing throw type also function as a double jump. KO City keeps things fresh by randomly selecting a special dodgeball each map. These range from balls like the moonball, which lets you jump extra high while carrying it, to the pinball style multi-ball, which lets you carry three balls at once. You can also fake throw, pass to teammates with a single button, and just generally the movement feels very good.

I think that gives a decent overview of the game’s general vibe, but really the best way to understand Knockout City is to play it.

The Not-Gameplay

While we’re here, let’s talk about monetization. There’s a lot of stuff for sale in Knockout City, but none of it impacts actual gameplay so I don’t care. Yes, there’s a battle-pass. Yes, there are multiple forms of currency. Yes, there’s daily quests, and normal quests, and I guess there’s a difference?

Frankly, while Knockout City does have an interesting sort of holographic projection 1920’s art design, I don’t like the art. There’s character customization. I ended up making my character look like this. I think it accurately conveys how much I care about the game’s aesthetics.

None of this relates to my primary issues with Knockout City though. My primary issue with Knockout City is… the menus and the clutter. That probably sounds stupid, but let me explain.

Knockout City just feels like it has a massive amount of downtime. Lots of your time is spent not playing Knockout City. After launching the game after an update, the game has to boot, update again (no, I don’t know why), close, and be relaunched. I decided to time how long it would take me to get into a game, and it takes just under a minute for the game to start up, click through the in-game announcements, and finally get into the hub.

Except you can’t play from the hub, instead you need to open the menu back up, select the “Play” option, pick your match type, and actually queue. After queuing, the match actually starting can take about 30 seconds. You want to quit the game? The menu option sort of shows up greyed out, but you can still click it.

There’s a lot of dead space, and dead time that splits up all the actual action, and makes it feel like a bit of a chore to keep playing. Even the matches have a one minute timer before they even start looking for another match, and this can’t be skipped. I’d understand if this was a COD style game with loadouts or a continual lobby, but neither of those exist here.

Overall I like Knockout City, but the game doesn’t do itself any favors with any of the small features. I feel like it’s best enjoyed as a game where you get a stack of friends, and all just goof off. That way you have folks to talk to or chat with during the downtime.

Knockout City is free on Steam, and also probably Epic, but I’m not going to check.

I played 50 games of Historic Brawl to try to figure out if Go-Shintai is being played too much. Here’s what I found.

In addition to writing on this blog, I stream a lot of Magic: The Gathering: Arena over on YouTube. It’s all part of the grand quest to acquire some level of fame or notoriety (I’m not picky. As long as it doesn’t get fired from my real job I’ll take either one) so that I can get a press badge.

Specifically, I play a format called Historic Brawl. Historic Brawl is effectively just Commander/EDH, but using all cards available in MTGA. About two weeks ago, Historic Anthology Six was added to Arena, and one card in that set was Go-Shintai of Life’s Origin. It is being used as a commander a lot. Perhaps too much?

So in order to answer this question, I played 50 games of Historic Brawl this weekend, across several different commanders. I’ll link the full dataset as a CSV at the end of the article. First off, I want to look at my own commanders very quickly.

There are two things to note here. First off is that I’m not playing any commanders that are traditionally considered S-Tier/top tier by the community. Second is that a majority of my commanders are from the Baldur’s Gate: Alchemy set.

Here are the commanders my opponents used.

Ed Note: A bunch of other commanders were played, but the graph doesn’t show them. Please see the full data for more info, also good lord those graph colors are awful, I’m so sorry.

Go-Shintai certainly feels like an outlier, with more than twice as many games as any other single commander. However, that’s not proof by any means. This is a small sample of only 50 games. I also haven’t done statistics in close to 8 years, so I’ve completely forgotten how to do a student’s T-Test, or even know if that’s the right type of analysis to do here.

The other interesting thing I noticed is that while I had a large number of games against Go-Shintai on Friday and Saturday, after one point on Saturday I stopped seeing the deck. I haven’t seen the deck a single time today. So it’s also possible that the matchmaker was updated in the middle of collecting this data set.

(The different matchups on different days is one of the things this data doesn’t show, because while I intended to include timestamps for the start of each game, I didn’t actually record them. So instead there’s an unhelpfully blank column in the spreadsheet.)

Overall, there isn’t a satisfying answer. It’s not clear to me that Go-Shintai’s frequency is actually statistically significant here (because I can’t do stats), but certainly stands out as being played quite a lot. If anyone is able to do actual stats, here’s a link to the data in a csv, and I’d love to know what you find.

A Brief Statement

Gametrodon condemns the behavior of the abusers at Activision-Blizzard, and the management that enabled them.

The next several months will likely determine if the company has any chance for reform, or will just act to save public face without making any actual commitment to demolishing a culture of sexism and abuse.

California Department of Fair Employment & Housing Complaint

NPR Coverage of the Complaint

An Open Letter from Blizzard Employees to Management

Jason Schreier’s Twitter – Writer for Bloomberg, and coverage of the unfolding events.

We encourage our readers to review the links above for more information and context.

The most valuable voices to listen to at this time are those who have had to endure this discrimination and abuse.

“Secret Lair Survey” Survey Results

I was curious, and created a bad survey to try to answer my curiosity. Here’s the data, why the survey was bad, and my attempt at a better one.

TLDR: MTG sent out a survey about possible future directions for Secret Lair subscriptions and pricing. I was curious who received the survey, so I sent out my own survey about their survey. Here is the raw data I collected as a CSV, minus contact info if it was provided. I didn’t do a great job following up on this one. I’ve also made a better version of the survey, trying to learn from my mistakes.

About three weeks back, a lot of people who had purchased Secret Lair products received an email asking them to take a survey about Secret Lair products. I did not receive this email, but I heard from friends who did.

I don’t have any screenshots of the survey (if you do, please send them over to me, I’d like to include them in this article), but I reached out to a few of the folks who received the it. The general gist I got from talking to folks was something like this:

  1. The survey contained a variety of offers, most related to different subscriptions/subscription offers.
  2. The specific pricing on these offers ranged price based on the survey, and some folks who opened the survey multiple times stated that they saw the amount change, which implies there was some A/B testing going on regarding price point.

Regarding the specific offers themselves, there were a few different types I saw mentioned. These included same day shipping on orders, a discount on purchases, and subscriptions to all Secret Lair products for a year.

Now, all of this is very interesting, and I’d write about it more if I actually had the link to said survey, and screenshots. But I don’t. What I’m interested in is who WoTC sent the survey to. It seems like they were primarily targeting individuals who spend large sums of money on Secret Lair with this survey.

So, I did what any bored motherfucker who thought they could get a clickbait article for their blog out of it reasonable person would: I put up a Google form, posted it to Reddit and Twitter, and waited for some responses.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I got enough responses to reasonably answer my question, but I did promise to release my data in those posts, so here it is in csv format. I’ve removed the column that included contact information, but left everything else.

I do want to quickly go over why I don’t believe this data can be used to support my hypothesis which went something like “WoTC was specifically targeting folks who had spent lots of money.”

Lets start with the big one: this is an incredibly small set of responses. I’m incredibly grateful to the folks who took the time to fill it out, but 38 data points is nowhere near enough to begin drawing meaningful conclusions, and not everyone who responded had even purchased Secret Lair products.

In addition to this, this survey was from a specific subset of the population of folks who might have even seen it, i.e., Twitter and Reddit users. So we have a fairly heavy sampling bias to add to that as well.

(I think it’s actually fairly easy to manipulate this data to make the argument you want. For example, if you look at the average spend of folks who received the survey, they spent more than folks who didn’t. But if you look at actual numbers of folks who bought Secret Lair products and received the survey versus those who didn’t, there’s no clear cutoff. This is also why I’m not comfortable drawing conclusions with this data.)

On the other hand, I think there are some valuable lessons to be learned here, at least from my side. Let’s go over them briefly, shall we?

  1. Have a testable hypothesis before you randomly ask strangers to give you info. Pretty sure any science or stats teacher would smack me for what I did here, at least in terms of going “Hey, lets just gather a bunch of data, and then think about it.”
  2. If I’m going to try to do something that is time sensitive, I need to actually move quickly. Plenty of people gave me contact info. I didn’t reach out to them, partly because I had other work stuff, mostly because the new Path of Exile league came out, and I started playing that non-stop. (It turns out that doing meaningful data analysis and journalism is hard, who would have thought.)
  3. Reach out to the company involved. I probably could have just emailed WoTC. I mean, I doubt they would have responded, but who knows. It couldn’t have hurt to have tried.

So, in the spirit of being curious if WoTC is about to lean hard into whale fracking learning from my own mistakes, I’ve created a brand new survey that attempts to fix the problems with the first one. This time, we’re only interested in two things: if you received the survey, and how much you spent on Secret Lair in 2020, and 2021.

You can fill it out here.

Again, I greatly appreciate anyone who takes the time to do so, and while I doubt this second survey will hit the numbers required to do meaningful analysis, I’ve tried my best to fix some of the flaws I noticed with the first one. And just like the first one, I’ll release whatever data I get publicly.