roncli.com blog

I've won another series and am now at Bronze II on the season, but not even Colz can stop me from getting wrecked by bad teams it seems, I'm 2-4 since placing into Bronze II. My mechanics are really bad, and I'm starting to wonder if I should be playing more than once a week to improve at my mechanics, but then I remember that it's Ron's Bronze Plays, and the plays won't be bronze if Ron gets good.

Descent Champions Ladder

I've won 3 more games against silver pilots recently, and that has rewarded me with becoming a silver pilot myself. I was never all that great at competitive Descent 1, and playing the masters of today really makes me feel that I have more to learn than just piloting. Granted, some of these pilots have spectacular aim as well, which is why I'm planning on switching over to mouse once my mouse patch gets into DXX Retro and becomes generally available. I'm almost to where I am today in skill with it, but need a lot more practice. I'm going to a Descent LAN in July, and I'm hoping that is when I'll be able to make the switch over to mouse.

roncli.com

I actually have good news about the website!

That's right, I'm almost DONE! There are only 4 bugs left. The font loading issue hasn't happened lately and I might be able to get rid of it. The login from cookie is a really strange bug that I can't reproduce, but is something I need to figure out and fix before launch. The allowed playlists deal was just a bad design decision I made earlier that I need to fix. And the fix image widths bug is where I have really big images that aren't being scaled down, which is causing the layout to break.

After that, it's all about content. The blog is easy enough, but adding the songs to Soundcloud will take time, and I need to write the pages for all of the rest of the content I intend to have. That alone might take days, but at least the major coding milestones have all been hit. I'm nearly 2 months behind my original target, but I think it'll be worth the wait!

Labels: Asana, Coding, DCL, Descent, Gaming, League of Legends, Ron's Bronze Plays, roncli.com, SoundCloud

Wednesday, April 08, 2015

Overdue update
Posted: 2:57:00 PM 0 comments

The Descent: Underground wiki has been taking up a lot of my free time, but I'm catching up.

League of Legends Ron's Bronze Plays

I'm finally in Bronze III after having a win on Lux and 2 on Janna. The promotional series games were so hard, we were actually quite behind in one of them. Thanks to Veg for helping me get through them!

I played with Colz last week and only went 1-2, but thankfully the losses came before the wins and didn't hurt my place in the standings any, so I go into week 11 at Bronze III and 26 LP.

Descent

If you've been following my DCL videos on YouTube, you'll see I've finally found some success, winning 6 matches in the past 2 weeks, including a match against the top bronze player to give me that spot. I feel like my aim is slowly coming online, but I'm going to try to play some "measuring stick" games against LotharBot (I've been scoring between 8 and 9 points) and Behemoth (between 5 and 6 points) today to see if that indeed is the case. I rediscovered the map June Bug, and am rapidly learning just how much I loved playing that map, too bad it was never all that popular.

The lagging website

I was expecting to have the new roncli.com done this month, but Descent: Underground has pretty much taken over. However, with that Kickstarter campaign winding down Friday, I should have time to resume my efforts, get something presentable, and move on to the next project.

Labels: Coding, DCL, Descent, Descent: Underground, Gaming, League of Legends, Ron's Bronze Plays, roncli.com

Friday, March 27, 2015

Slowing it down
Posted: 2:20:00 PM 0 comments

Not a whole lot going on this week. Work has been slow on roncli.com, but I'm hoping to pick it up and finish off major coding this weekend. Right now I'm working on allowing files to be uploaded straight through the website, which will allow me to manage the files without having to do something silly like FTP.

The Six Gaming Podcast was in rare form this week, as we had a solid episode and a good roundtable discussion about how microtransactions have been shaping modern gaming.

Ron's Bronze Plays returned for more League of Legends action, and this week I teamed up with Veg. The first game seemingly almost guaranteed disaster when I was put onto Jinx, but I outplayed the other ADC enough to earn a win and a promotional series. The next game I was on Janna, but our team could never get going as every lane seemed to feed. The best game of the day was next up with a 54 minute epic Morgana. Despite not having the kill lead, we kept up with objectives enough to grow a 10000 gold lead. Although we got aced twice in the enemy base, being 3-inhibitored multiple times allowed us to just play patient with Baron, and march in and win. The final game wiped all that out, however, as it ended up being a 3v5 after our jungler failed to connect and our ADC didn't start playing until about 3 minutes, and ragequit another 3 minutes later after having a severe level disadvantage. As a result, I remain in Bronze IV, but am still a game away from a second set of promotions. One of these times they'll go my way.

Finally, on my YouTube page, you'll find a metric boatload of Descent and Descent 2 videos I've been uploading, including my horrible start to the DCL. The highlight was an absolute crazy game in Fuzed where Jackeh outlasted me in a game to 20, win by 2. The final score was deep into overtime, 26 to 24. Fantastic game. I still have yet to earn my first win, the skill of the pilots still playing is clearly above mine. I have some targets to try to get that win off of, however, and will hopefully get on the board before the end of the current DCL season, which ends at the end of the month.

Labels: Coding, DCL, Descent, Gaming, League of Legends, Ron's Bronze Plays, roncli.com, Six Gaming Podcast

Monday, March 09, 2015

Weekend Roundup: SGP #4, RBP #7
Posted: 5:33:00 PM 0 comments

First of all, stop what you're doing and subscribe to the Six Gaming YouTube channel. We go live with the Six Gaming Podcast every Saturday at 11pm ET, and post highlights from the previous episode the Monday after every episode. On the Podcast, we talk a lot about Blizzard news and games, but this week in particular, our fourth episode of the reboot, we had a lot of discussion about happenings from GDC and PAX East. @show_san dropped off the podcast at the last minute this week, leaving me to host. I was largely unprepared, as you'll see in the video. We did, however, talk a lot about virtual reality, free game engines, and more. I enjoy being there because it's an unscripted chat with friends about today's gaming topics. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

I also do a weekly show called "Ron's Bronze Plays", highlighting my struggle to get out of the Bronze rank in League of Legends. I figure if I could do it in Season 4, I can do it in Season 5, right? Riiight. This week, the seventh on the season, showed why it's still going to be a challenge.

I started out with a Lux game where Sivir decided she was going to curse out Morgana two minutes into the match for not taking the right skill to start. It only got worse from there, and although we had great dragon control, we couldn't crack the bottom inhibitor, and despite the other team not having a jungler we ended up taking the loss.

The second game I got a wild hair up my ass and played Caitlyn. My support Thresh, though, took far too many risks... risks that got him killed repeatedly. He ended the game with 13 deaths. I recovered from the catastrophe, though, getting 8 kills, my most as an ADC in ranked. The game was really back and forth until we threw at Baron late, and they 3-inhib'ed us.

In game three I went back to Lux, and I had a poor showing, my first game in a while where I didn't even register a kill on her. The other team's Master Yi was the story of the game as he'd get repeated triple kills, completely cleaning up in team fights.

The final game of the night I went back to Morgana and finally had a half-way competent ADC in Tristana who knew that engaging a Draven/Leona was not the best idea. Unbeknownst to us (until she got 17 kills in 20 minutes), we had a mid-laner LeBlanc on a smurf whose main was Platinum 3. We facerolled HARD, with LeBlanc getting 3 kills in 5 minutes, including one on a Shaco jungle gank when she was at low health.

I only lost 13 points on the night, though, so a good week next week can get me right back into promos. Hopefully my mechanics won't be as terrible as they were this week. Current stats: 9-15, Bronze IV, 77 LP.

Labels: Gaming, League of Legends, Ron's Bronze Plays, Six Gaming Podcast

A Recommitment
Posted: 4:02:00 PM 0 comments

I recently went back in time to the beginning of this blog and revisited the things that interested me back then. I found that I did a heck of a lot more blogging then than I do today, largely because I made a commitment to keep people updated as to what I was doing.

I started this blog when I was working on OSMusic.Net back in the day. I had a lot of free time, largely because I had no idea what kind of focus (and design, for that matter) I needed to get the site to take off. I ended up doing things in my free time that didn't help the site along. Such as blogging.

Blogging became a regular part of my life in mid-2005, and it was fun. I wasn't involved in much back then, as TiS 1 had died and TiS 2 hadn't been thought of yet. I started blogging about on-again-off-again gaming, then about the struggle I had with maintaining all of my side projects, then focus shifted to stresses at work, until finally things got so hectic I pretty much just fell off the face of the Internet, only blogging on major events such as hurricanes or job changes. I've tried to kickstart things over the years, but nothing has stuck.

But with the revamped roncli.com website on the horizon (I'm looking to finish coding and content by the end of the month), I strongly feel that a recommitment of sorts is required to keep content on the site fresh, and to enable easier Nightstalker-stalking, so to speak.

So, here's the deal. I do a lot of things during the week that I've taken for granted. The Six Gaming Podcast, World of Warcraft raids, League of Legends streaming (specifically Ron's Bronze Plays on Sundays), and other random streaming events.

I also still code a hell of a lot. Previously, I'd blog frequently about my findings with certain things, which would result in code snippets that show you how to read an NWS weather feed, or double buffer a list view. I still want to do stuff like this, especially since I'm playing with cutting-edge libraries such as rendr.

I just haven't given myself enough time to do any of this. But with me no longer running raids for Six Minutes To Release, that time now exists.

Therefore, here's my commitment. On days when I do something noteworthy, I will blog about it. You won't see me talk about every WoW raid, or every line of code I write, but it'll be frequent enough to give everyone an idea as to what's going on in my world.

Labels: Blog, Gaming, League of Legends, Life, Rendr, Ron's Bronze Plays, roncli.com, Six Gaming Podcast, Six Minutes To Release, World of Warcraft