Let's Swap Noob Stories

DoPo

"You're not cleared for that."
Jan 30, 2012
8,665
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Dornedas said:
So he grinded (ground?) the Tamo Highland until level 20 before he finally gave up.
Haha! And that reminds me of another friend of mine. He told me his story relatively recently because we didn't know each other back when D2 came out. His deal was that he got to Act 2 where the first quests is in the sewers or whatever under the town and he thought you need to find an exit there for the rest of the act. So he also spent an awful lot of time grinding in the tunnels until he got past level 20 and THEN he realised there is a giant exit he could have taken.
 

Hawk of Battle

New member
Feb 28, 2009
1,191
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sageoftruth said:
I'm quite the Magic the Gathering noob myself. What is a mana curve? I'm guessing it has something to do with basing the number of lands you should have, on the costs of your spells and summons?
That's part of it. It's the number of cards you have in your deck and their associated mana costs. It's easier to show someone, but as an example, in a 60 card deck you generally want around a third to be land, which equates to around 24 land cards. However, depending on the number of high/low cost cards you have this can change. So the best thing to do is lay out all the cards so that your 1 mana spells are in 1 row, your 2 mana spells in another, and so on, so that you can easily see how many of each cost you have in the deck. Ideally, you want the deck to "curve", with maybe a few 1 drops, then slightly more 2 drops, peaking at around 3-4, then having fewer 5 and 6 drops. This shows you where the bulk of your cards fall on your deck, and assuming you draw consistently well, how likely you are to be able to play creatures or other spells on each subsequent turn.

What you don't usually want is, for example, a deck with 12+ 6 mana creatures, and only like 4 2-3 mana creatures, because you'll likely end up with all these expensive cards in your hand way too much and have nothing to cast for the first 5 turns.

This then impacts the amount of land you run. If your curve is quite low, say for example it has nothing above 4 mana, then you don't need as many lands because you'll start drawing too many as the game drags on and each additional land you draw probably doesn't help you, whereas if you have quite a few more higher cost cards, then you'll need to add a few more lands, to ensure you consistently draw lands and can play these cards out on curve.

Of course, you also then need the right ratio of mana of whatever colours your deck is running as well, so whilst your deck is laid out this way you can easily count the mana symbols in the costs and compare how many there are of each. Also bear in mind cards that cost double or more of a certain colour, and where on the curve these colours are. It might be that most of your 1-3 mana cards only require a single red mana, but late game your 4+ cards might require double green, which is going to require you upping the number of forests, with the problem being that the more forests you add, the more likely you draw them early, where they aren't as needed. Having a balance of colours and not getting greedy is a must.

This is all just general ideas of course. Depending on the format you're playing or the strategy your deck is based around can wildly affect your curve. My modern deck for example has only 18 lands and nothing above 3 mana, despite being 3 colours, due to the excellent colour fixing available, but my edh decks, being 100 card singleton decks, all have 30+ lands, and some, like my [mtg_card= Animar, Soul of Elements] runs about 40 creatures, with many of them triple green 6 or more costs. In sealed you generally run a 40 card deck, due to having a much more limited number of semi-random cards, and there you typically run 17 lands, only varing by +/- 1 if you're an aggressive deck or not.

There are people who can explain much better than me though, and with visual aids. Youtube can probably help you more.
 

Baffle

Elite Member
Oct 22, 2016
3,459
2,746
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I played Heroquest on the Amiga on a black-and-white TV. In black and white the 'continue' button is the same colour as everything else. I could not continue, my path was blocked.
 

Scarim Coral

Jumped the ship
Legacy
Oct 29, 2010
18,157
2
3
Country
UK
Back in Guild Wars, I was in party and we were preping ourselves for this very hard quest (the one where you have to resuce an npc from a village full of pirate which was ALOT).

Anyway, when one of my party members was away for a bathroom break and this person barg into the outpost we were at and was a farmer, asking for gold to solo that quest.

We were in team speak and complain how much of an ass that farmer is and when the guy came back from the toliet asking what was going on. I PM him about the farmer BUT I end up PM the farmer instead!

I suppose it was a good thing the farmer was not a total jerk as he simply brush me off as a total noob (didn't insult me but rather laugh it off).
 

Plucky

Enthusiast Magician
Jan 16, 2011
448
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All i remember from newbie days of Runescape was that i initially made money running bananas into the box on Karamja whilst waiting for the Knife/Rope spawns to regenerate, which then i sold to the general store. think this was before TzHaar was released and was YEARS before the Grand Exchange and stuff like Lodestones.
 

Death Carr

Less Than 3D
Mar 30, 2011
555
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My very first game device was a gameboy advance, I got it for christmas along with the Star wars episode 2 game
being young, and an idiot I disregarded the manual and dived straight in
the first level faces you (as anakin (I think)) against droids of some kind
and i didn't know how to attack
eventually I figured out that pressing one of the buttons makes you jump, which makes the character sprite tip the lightsaber forward
Needless to say I didn't make much headway and died a lot
eventually my dad found the button to attack in the manual and I got past the first level
the furthest I got was to the kamino level where my tiny young brain couldn't understand that i'd need colour coded keycards to progress
I got the harry potter chamber of secrets game shortly after and exclusively played that
 

sageoftruth

New member
Jan 29, 2010
3,417
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I recall playing Diablo at a very young age. I started as a Warrior and was thinking "A warrior fights so he must have strength, but what is this 'dexterity' thing I see on the stats screen?" No, really, I was too young to know what "Dexterity" meant. Since I didn't know what it was for, I treated it like a 'Luck' stat and ignored it. If any of you watched Konosuba, I was basically Darkness. I couldn't hit anything and bosses ate me for breakfast.

I later tried playing as a Mage, but the fact that there was no place to auto-restore my mana made me afraid to ever use any of my spells. I went after everything with my staff and got my ass handed to me by Fallen, Scavengers, Zombies, and Skeletons.
 

Johnny Novgorod

Bebop Man
Legacy
Feb 9, 2012
18,465
3,005
118
I don't have a good one but here's my girlfriend failing and raging (in Spanish) at vidjagames 101.
https://soundcloud.com/user-295986320/maruca-juega-tomb-raider
 

Thurston

New member
Nov 1, 2007
154
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I've really enjoyed the Borderlands series. I'd figure I'd demo it for a co-worker. He died SIX TIMES in the tutorial, like even before meeting Dr. Zed. I then realized I'd been playing FPS's on and off, for 20 years. He had never played one before.