Now, before you think I’m heading into a spiral about the state of education in America and how kids can’t read anymore, realize that I’m probably on your side. But also, that I’m on the side of the kids. They were brought up in a far different world than I was. Now they are doing amazing things that were impossible a generation ago. But there was always the brain rot lying under the surface that I had to watch out for.
I wasn’t there to work on the brain rot. My job was to give them the skills to succeed.
That evening, I sat there watching as the two of them sliced and diced their opposition for several hours. It was the first time I’d seen someone with an AC over 100. Both were League quality players, and they started their stuff like they should play this professionally instead of going to community college. I was kind of wondering what they were studying because either they were just so naturally gifted that it was problematic or something else was going on. Maybe they had signed a deal with a devil that let them have these incredible powers.
I mean, if the old man had given me the patch notes, then perhaps, he’d giving other people patch notes. Perhaps he had done it in exchange for their soul or something. I did not know. With their over 100 AC, they had an AP of 180 each. I was getting close to figuring out what the actual cap was going to be. I was wondering if there was a hard cap. I thought it was 100 before. But seeing these guys decimate their foes and had given me pause. It was a quirk of the system that let me see they both had an attack of over 20. This meant that if I got my guys to a defense of 20 perhaps, I would be evenly matched and then if I went further and then chose a defensive option for that round, then it might work. The only problem was they had high farming and high technique.
It was a puzzle. I could only really work on one attribute. If I wanted to match them and see what a matchup would look like. I could have Esther on attack and go up against their defense of 20 or I could have Ester on defense and go up against their attack. 22. Their mechanics of course were 20. The other option I had was to see if I could focus on Esther’s mechanics and bring those up. Realizing that I was going to have to do actual math, you’ll never believe what I did.
I made an Excel spreadsheet.
Esther Kim
AP 140 AC 100
22 Offense
20 Defense
18 Mechanics
22 Reflex
18 Farming
XX Morale
XX Fatigue
Fill
PREF: ???
Esther is a Business AAS Student, Studying Publishing Options and Management Degrees. She wants to be a Yuri or romantasy writer.
Your girl has so many skills from using Excel for other projects that just go to waste. The first thing I wanted to prove was if an attack versus an attack was a thing or if it was an attack versus their defense. And I guess my question really was. How would I figure that out? If the defender could kill the attacker? Did that mean that the defender had better attack them the attacker? Or was there some other confounding factors? So I was considering what it would mean for an attack to be just purely against a defense.
Now, if I used their tactics, that was another thing. How would I be able to use those effectively?
I considered putting Esther in the top lane against one of them. I knew what their stats were. I knew her stats were, and I could give them a head-to-head mashup right there. Their stats were higher than hers, but I could push her stats up and see if that would compensate. Here, I thought it would be one of the three that I would have to push. If I pushed attack, defense, or mechanics then, she might come up on top. The hard cap I thought there was for abilities at twenty had proved demonstratively false.
If I could get her over the cap and some of these things, then she could slay.
I checked on my group chat during their last match, and Esther was also watching the brothers playing.
Kelly: what do you think about doing a one-on-one in a top lane versus one of these guys?
Esther: Do you think I should try that?
Molded it over for a bit. If this match was going to be a loss anyway, then I might as well learn some more things about the system. Chief among those was if setting her in a defensive position with a high defense would beat back their attacking position when they were in the attack. All things being equal. If my Defender had a higher defense stat, then their attack, then we should be winning. Or at least that lane we should not lose. In that case, I thought I would check on her defense and mechanics that and use those as the parameter for what I was going to do next week.
What I was going to do next really depended on what the rest of the team wanted to do.
Raquel: Professor, are you going to go assign us roles this early?
Kellie: If we play against the B team and they’re trying to simulate what these guys are doing here, then we’ll be more than well prepared for this game.
Raquel: Oh, this is delicious.
The group chat animated for a bit with GIFs of all kinds of things that I can’t even imagine explaining.
Just like that, I had a plan for what is going to have to be my most difficult match of the season. It wasn’t a guarantee. Heck, it wasn’t even a near concept of a plan. It was something that I worked up. I was going to manage this team to success, I was going to have to figure out how to manage them into improving.
Rachel worked her magic, and the stage was set.
---
You think that for two men that share a YouTube channel they might dress alike on the night that they had a game.
You would be right.
It was one of the first things I saw. That drip. Oh, and the ridiculous architecture of the host.
New Jersey Institute of Technology was hosting our match. Not that I hated Newark. It had come around a lot since I was a kid. From what used to be the murder capital of the of New Jersey to the home of Corey Booker, US senator. I wasn’t afraid to get there, just more annoyed at having to wear pants and a bra.
The location was prime for an easy drive from Ridgewood. I just took route seventeen down and got on the turnpike. I was so glad that the team had the use of that official team van on Thursday nights when we were in away games. We played commentary from the EWR guys as we drove.
The arena itself was one of the floors of the architecture school. That building itself was on Martin Luther King Junior boulevard, just a 2-minute walk from Essex County College.
In between Rutgers University, New Jersey Institute technology and Essex County College, was a bustling boulevard. This being Thursday night, it was looking like a frat row itself. That we were only a block away from several fraternity buildings has nothing to do with my assessment. Everyone else was sizing up to have a fun time. Tech bros passed by us, looking like they were having the time of their lives.
I checked the parking area three times to make sure that I was doing everything right before I departed and headed in. They were graceful in letting us part right next to the architecture building. I even had street parking reserved.
This time, Rachel’s company could not provide the materials. Essex County had a company come in and do it. This meant that she couldn’t come in. She was doing the UCNJ versus Hunterdon matchup that night, anyway. Duty calls.
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
The Newark’s finest tech bro company, Inc were just there to make sure that there was no cheat software. NJIT themselves had built special units just for this so they could test out some software and hardware situations for their own students. In a way, we were guinea pigs. But also, in a way, we were helping higher education and bringing our students together and getting ready to smash their faces in, metaphorically. It’s just that I was pretty sure that they were trying to run the game server on a raspberry pi connected with sticks.
I spent several minutes getting myself set up and then hyping up the team. It would do them. No good to focus on whatever finals they just failed or passed this week. I needed their minds in the game. We had a last-minute substitution from our B team. A club guy named Lonnie had subbed in for Bob. Bob was being a little shit. He had a prior commitment and I get it. Esports aren’t that important. Honestly, who scheduled a Bar Mitzvah on a Thursday night?
Lonnie was a class act. A member of the B team who I had requested several times to fill in, he was a dedicated mid laner who sometimes went top. In other words, he was a switch.
After you determined which lanes the brothers were taking, she took either top or mid, and Lonnie took the remaining lane. He kind of took the game on a special path when you avoided the jungle and just thought about feeling the top two lanes with one person each. Way back in the original days, the jungle was not as big of a thing. It grew as the game got bigger to be more of a role, but then again, things change. A 10-year-old game might be stable, but a lot of things happened the first two years, so then it became commercially viable.
We begin our ban round by forgetting about any strategy that we had ever used before.
The EWR guys were adept at most characters, and I’d seen each use about seven.
Seven different avatars would not be in the cards for us to ban. If each team could ban five, then at most we might pick five of theirs. That would let them pick five of ours.
The normal thing we do is play tit for tat. But this time, I just let them do what they wanted to do. Esther LED them and destroying many of the top lanes that these two guys loved, and they also worked back by banning the same amount of things that Esther liked.
Everyone realized Esther was our star player. Of all the players regularly in rotation, Esther showed up most on the Bulldog’s official social media account. Heck, I had even made her a blue-sky star by re-skeeting her several times.
Even with a constant interference of the crowd, I was not concerned with my guy’s performance. Tonight, they had put in their paces.
Tonight, we were just going to see if some math worked out in our favor. As soon as the first EWR guy picked his Lane, Esther swapped. This swapped. Lonnie, as the EWR guys, had chosen for one of them to take the mid lane. I considered how this was going to go. But in the end, all it took was the guys executing the training that we had performed flawlessly.
As the game began, I slid the strategy over to farming. I would let them briefly work on that. My guy sent out their Little Swan campers to the Jungle, and Esther began her defense of the avatars.
If anything, she threw herself into the game with even more gusto than the week before. This time, a win would put us in a position to go to the Atlantic City finals. Esther apparently wanted to go to Atlantic City badly. That it was the week after the finals of our school meant that she could probably drink whatever she wanted, and she had told me already that she had her eyes on a bottle of soju and a wonderful novel.
That novel just was in one of my coat pockets at that exact moment.
I was excited to discuss the latest issue of “Reincarnated as a Level 99 Villainess” with her. After the game. It felt awkward to talk about these kinds of things while we were in the team van but after the game while everyone was getting ready to go? That would be too easy.
The EWR guy tried to keep Pace with her. But she was subtly out leveling him. By the time minute four had rolled around. She had gotten enough gold to go back and get a few things to respect her character. She pushed her way to his turret and then ran back. I was so proud of my girl.
In the bottom lane, things were not doing so well, but that’s okay. They had a strategy. Farm and denial was the name of the game. Even though I had set up the strategy as defense, I kept sitting behind Raquel and basically if I could click the mouse for her to do it, I would, but she was getting all the golds she needed.
Not only that, but she also denied ground to the other EWR. Best himself looked like he was frustrated with his support. Murph was running circles around Raquel like a little cheerleader. And every time one of their opponents made a play for it, he would lock them down. Then they would have to decide to either stay there and try to fight as a coop decide to run off while they got free hits on the one character for about 6 seconds.
This little trick right here and in many of his fights before they even started. It cost a lot of mana, but he bought a few mana potions with the express idea of just using them to nuke the other guys into staying in one spot for long enough to deal damage. And then Raquel had picked a character with a special poison scale that did damage over time for a few seconds. Just a few hits from her spell and she was dealing an extra 100 damage for 5 seconds each second.
Before long, round two arrived. So far, my guys had kept the score. Neil nil. This was a pretty standard thing before the team fights began. But I could see that. EWR finest were having some problems. In every game that he played before, one of those two guys had gotten a kill by minute 10. Right now? Nobody had gotten a kill yet. They were probably asking themselves what the heck was going on.
That’s when I set my strategy once again to defense. I could see their strategy was still on offense. Perfect. I could see a small boost to my defenders’ stats.
If they were going to launch rocks at me, I was going to turtle the heck up.
Midway through figuring out what the heck they wanted to do, our jungle met Esther and Murph in the center for our first attempt at a gank. He had just bought something and come back refreshed and all the sudden he was getting hit by three people.
Normally, he would have nothing to do with us. He probably would have moved out.
That wasn’t what happened.
There’s a feeling you get when you are really working hard at something. It’s possible: It’s possible to get a sense of unearned confidence. There’s also a feeling when those things are completely upturned and your life, as you know it was a lie.
The two boys from Newark felt that right about then.
We almost got one of them, hitting them hard enough with fear, making them retreat far behind their line of minions and towers.
I was going to get them flustered. The new meta was to make them think Ester was the only problem. Ester didn’t want to be part of the solution. She, in fact, had ideas for how to make the problem worse.
“Professor, can you get the bottom lane team to pretend to feint for dragon, then feint returning to their lane?”
“With pleasure.”
She was getting a better game picture. I wasn’t sure if it was getting some of her stats over the supposed cap, but she was getting it. I checked her stats. Post out training and post her solo training Wednesday night, she had advanced significantly.
Esther Kim
AP 140 AC 110
22 Offense
22 Defense
24 Mechanics
22 Reflex
18 Farming
XX Morale
XX Fatigue
Fill
PREF: ???
Esther is a Business AAS Student, Studying Publishing Options and Management Degrees. She wants to be a Yuri or romantasy writer.
I was so proud of her. Then I checked on my bottom laners to see where they were at.
Racquel
AP 50 AC 35
3 Offense
7 Defense
10 Mechanics
4 Reflex
11 Farming
XX Morale
XX Fatigue
BOT
PREF: BOT
Racquel is a business major and the President of the Bergen County Bulldogs e-sports club. When she graduates, she wants a to continue her education at Montclair State University. She is studying psychology but is telling everyone that she is a business major.
Murph
AP 50 AC 34
4 Offense
12 Defense
6 Mechanical
1 Reflex
11 Farming
XX Morale
XX Fatigue
SUP
PREF: SUP
Murph is an E-Business Management Student and the vice president of the BCC Bulldogs esports club.
If they could figure out a way to improve their ability potential, then that meant that I might push that even higher. I had always seen that as a hard cap with no option to fix it. Esther had broken through a threshold just like Racquel and Murph, who had both been at a 40 AP prior.
This meant that combined that could hold off EWRBEST in the bottom lane. The poor guy was looking fine, though. Despite the brothers doing the best that they could, I was seeing them get frustrated.
Frustrated gamers go one of two ways. They give up, or they do what’s known as a pro gamer move, leaning into their chairs and getting into the game.
They were already in the game.
Now I thought they might get frustrated and lose focus. That was the meta that I was aiming for.
The minute ticked over to ten and I could see that both EWR brothers were tiring of the grind and wanting to get somewhere. I checked the match ratings for my guys and most of them were at an eight. Esther was a ten. On their side, the EWR guys both had a ten, but everyone else on their side had a six.
Perfect.
Operation full court press was in effect. We were getting under their skin like seasonal depression or missing a hot sneaker drop.
None of my guys had gotten a gank because our focus was on the terrain. None of their guys could move forward because we weren’t letting up.
It was a stalemate.
But they didn’t expect a stalemate. According to my notes, they had steamrolled everyone they had already gone against.
This was an unexpected stalemate.
I’ve been in a stalemate before, but they eventually overpowered us. Right now, it was all coming down to the line with whoever got the edge with farming.
If I was inside of the game, I could check with one of their status screens. As it stood, I could check out the two monitors to the small crowd that was observing.
My jaw dropped, and I carefully placed it back into position.
We were ahead in farming. Not by too much, but enough that it was the equivalent of one character having a better weapon. It meant that the poor guys were doing more work trying to attack us than they were farming.
That meant that defense was more linked to farming than attack, all things being equal. Well, at least that part of the patch was clearer to me. I immediately started thinking about how this could be exploited. If I could get the opponent to implement the wrong strategy, then I could manage my team to be on top. It was the old rock, paper scissors argument.
Defense beat attack.
Attack beat farming.
Farming beat… defense?
That had to be it. This just confirmed it.
With some theory crafting… I could look at the actual numbers from several efforts between people and then see if the one on one worked. If I had figured this out a moment sooner, I wondered if this would have been easier. I had barely gotten a handle on advancing my team.
And with that, I had a path forward. I just needed my guys to beat these kids’ faces in.