Patrick Mackey
- Columnist -
Although he enjoys unwinding in PvE and roleplaying, Patrick's first gaming love is competition and the nuance of gaming mechanics that comes with playing games at the most intense levels. A regional tournament champion, Patrick takes his gaming seriously, whether it is MMO PvP or an intense match of Street Fighter 4.
He is an ardent pursuer of the intrinsic satisfaction of deep game knowledge; he balks when other gamers insist that "games are for fun."
Patrick Mackey's Latest Posts
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The Summoner's Guidebook: Teaming up to fight in League of Legends
Grouping up to fight enemies together is a concept that is old as history itself. Numerous treatises on group warfare have been written, ranging from small unit tactics to battle strategies involving hundreds of thousands or millions of combatants. A lot of the same principles of combat that are ...
The Summoner's Guidebook: League of Legends' Season 3 imbalances -- good or bad?
If you've played League of Legends for a while, you were probably shocked at the launch of all the new Season 3 changes. They're absolutely crazy! When I first saw them, I couldn't make heads or tails of them. What's the new best item builds? What's the best path to making them? I seriously had ...
First impressions from the Age of Wushu beta
When I first started playing the Age of Wushu beta, I had a lot of expectations. As I first started playing, the game felt ho-hum. It was clumsy, the translation wasn't very good, and the combat felt clunky. My friends saved an infamous IM conversation during which I expressed how the game was a ...
The Summoner's Guidebook: One lady fights for equality in the League of Legends
If you recall from a few months back, we covered gender equality in League of Legends. The general outcome of that column was that women are under-represented in the tank and melee fighter roles and are very over-represented in the support role. Furthermore, women are heavily objectified in LoL, ...
The Summoner's Guidebook: IPL's League of Legends a paragon of tournaments
I feel a bit tuckered out from League of Legends tournaments. I love the game, and I love the pro scene, but sometimes I'm just not in the mood to watch hours and hours of gameplay and then try to digest it all. As a columnist, I have to watch tournaments with a different eye than a normal ...
The Summoner's Guidebook: Roaming the jungle in League of Legends Dominion
Although players often consider jungling to be a role exclusive to League of Legends' Classic gametypes, proper exploitation of the jungle is vitally important to success in Dominion as well. At the lower levels of play, players often feed too much information to the enemy and allow their foes to ...
The Summoner's Guidebook: Why play League of Legends Dominion?
Lately, there's been a bit of doomsaying about League of Legends' point capture gametype. Red posts on the subject have mentioned that while the dedicated Dominion playerbase is slowly growing, the lower-level playerbase is shrinking. This is unfortunate because a lot of LoL players just don't ...
The Summoner's Guidebook: League of Legends' revamped 3v3 mode
I really liked playing on the Twisted Treeline prior to the recent revamp. It felt like Summoner's Rift lite: a way to practice the key SR skills in a gametype that didn't require quite as much map awareness. Now, League of Legends' 3v3 mode has taken on a different face, and it doesn't feel much ...
The Summoner's Guidebook: Tiers don't belong in League of Legends
One of the things that really bother me is when players make tier lists of characters in League of Legends. Tier lists are an often subjective measurement of how good a character is when matched up against other characters, and players like to voice their opinions on who is strong and who is ...
Teaming up with Hi-Rez for some Halloween SMITE
Halloween is a holiday when people typically dress up in outlandish costumes and go out hunting for treats. This year, I got to put a bit of a different spin on it by dressing up as a mythological god and going out to hunt for gold and items in some games of SMITE. Hi-Rez invited Massively along ...
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The Daily Grind: Are you still excited to try RIFT's free-to-play option?
Posted on May 18th 2013 8:00AM
