Arlen

Sometimes, when a game tells you that you’re 70 percent done, you get annoyed because you suspect the dev team only counted main story as half of it. And yet you have this high percentage on your screen, but your save file is so empty. For most gamers, completing things is just a checklist; if … Read more

At some point in every player’s life they open their digital library of hundreds of games and question if it was all worth it. They purchase games based off promises of adventure, yet the price tag never shows how little thought they actualy gave to the decision. The playtime cost per hour calculator turn the … Read more

Until you know how to do the math, it’s hard to organize a tournament. Single elimination is easy. Round robin is exhausting. For big fields, Swiss systems is fairer then both. But fairness comes at a cost: time and table management. Run too few rounds and you’ll never get enough resolution; people will go away … Read more

It’s your turn to play: You’re sitting in the lobby waiting for the match, and you’re already worried that your team will be lost. Most of the time, it won’t be due to pure bad luck; rather, it’ll have something to do with spread of skills among teammates and whether that spread align with your … Read more

For their inaugural game tournament, they had six teams playing each other in the first round. It was supposed to be an hour. It ended up taking them three and a half hours. Because one, the organizers forgot that changeovers add up; two, players need to go to the bathroom; and three, people forget where … Read more

When you sit down for those initial placement matches, you have a singular goal in mind: to hit your true skill level without wasting three weeks climbing back up from Bronze. So, yes, you’re anxious, it’s the nature of the beast. In the calibration stage, the matchmaking system gets to find the relative value of … Read more

Skill plus psychology lead to series of promotions. By this time, you’ve prepped, practiced and are ready to go, but now it’s come down to something that seems so arbitrary, a matter of nerves. A lot of times it isn’t about being the most talented. For player, it’s more about handling pressure during each match … Read more

Inventory panic is running out of room in your bag mid-dungeon run. It happens in all sorts of games; from massively multiplayer online games to survival simulations. You come across that rare item you’ve been searching for, only to discover you have half-stacks of arrows and herbs scattered throughout your inventory. Time to drop the … Read more

Looking at that ranked ladder thinking ‘can I make it up? Can’t I do it?” That’s hardly a matter of skill anymore. After you get out of beginning brackets, it’s all a matter of organization. How much variance in your win rate can you afford? How many matches can you play and still feel fresh … Read more

The calculator take in three variables: your anticipated winning percentage, points earned from each win, and points deducted for each loss. From there it computes how much ground you’ll move every game. Your “winning percentage” is what everyone’s focused on (fifty-five percent is the magic number). They fail to realize, though, that their loss penalty … Read more

After filling your inventory, you can’t move as fast when picking up treasure. That’s not some animation bug, that’s what happens when you’re encumbered. Encumbrance forces you to balance moving around and being safe within the game system. Players tend to forget about it until they’re locked in a dungeon. Using the above calculator will … Read more

There’s nothing worse than being on the fence about whether or not a game bundle is worth it and staring blankly at a screen for 10 minutes trying to figure it out. There is some good-looking base gems, plus bonus currency, event discounts, duplicates returned, vague promises of additional pulls, etc. It starts to feel … Read more