Quintessential Vladimir guide for season 11

 
Well hello there wonderful people. My name is Calvin and I stream under the name Elite500, as the title suggests, I’ve been challenger for 4 seasons now and ended it since the last 2.
 
I’ve played vlad throughout every meta, no matter how rough or how much the playstyle has changed, and I’m finally here, bringing to YOU the absolute ULTIMATE, QUINTESSENTIAL, HOLY guide, everything you will ever need for season 11. At the time of writing this guide I’ve played around 500 preseason games and half of them in high challenger.
 
Why play Vladimir? Doesn’t he actually suck? Isn’t he noobchamp?
 
Do you wish to experience the pleasure of entering teamfights and leaving them higher hp?
 
Do you want to dehumanise yourself to and not even recognise your fellow teammates as sentient meat lumps? Can you handle the responsibility to take every game post 20 minutes as your responsibility?
Of course you do.
 
 

Table of contents:

1. Setups: we’ll go over the main 2 setups including items, runes, summoners, and build
2. How to choose between the two setups and which play-style suits you best
3. Early laningphase and how to play matchups
4. Every matchup in the game including recommended setups for matchups
5. Unleashing unholy wrath upon your foes in mid to lategame
6. Combos
7. Skin choice

 

Setup one, the way of the gigalord:

Back in season 7 the chad vladimir players received an upgrade from thunderlords decree, electrocute, termed GIGALORDS back then, it’s power has been dormant and ever waiting since the nerfs of 2018.
 
This path is more optimally suited for those who wish to have devastating all in damage, those who wish to win lane as early as level 3, those who want to annihilate and leave them with .no counterplay 100-0s
 
This setup is best suited and optimally played against melee champions such as Sylas, Pantheon, Yone, Yasuo, Ekko, Akali, Kata, etc.
 

Summoner spells:

Ignite and flash are a must take with this setup, allowing you to deliver sudden oneshots with flash and having beyond unholy all in damage with ignite. Ignite also helps us with nimbus cloak and with procing electro.
 

Runes

Keystone:

Of course you’ll be taking electrocute as your keystone, it allows you to win a lot of trades early into the game, it’s easily proccable early with auto Q auto or auto E Q or even auto ignite Q.
The trading is nice although the main reason you take this keystone is for the HEINOUS all in damage it can do, most champions can literally be 100-0 oneshot at level 6 if they’re not innately invulnerable (looking at you galio).
 

Minor runes, domination:

Taste of blood is absolutely amazing and helps out in every melee matchup, feel free to swap this to sudden impact if you’re deranged and play this setup into ranged opponents. (sudden impact proccable with rocketbelt.
 
Poro ward is extremely consistent and can be stacked easily to grant you free 4 ap level 3 and 30 ap at around ~ 16 – 18 minutes depending on how actively you ward and where.
 
Ravenous hunter synergises so well with vlads huge point and click Q damage, easily accumulating 10’000 HP healed in a game. While it doesn’t sound like much, since the rune was changed from spellvamp to omnivamp it now will even heal you slightly on autohits even without stacks helping you outsustain early. Some crazy gamer chinese vlads will take ultimate hunter since their server is perma fighting, it’s also a viable choice but feels worse to me.

Secondary runes, sorcery:

For sure my favourite secondary tree to spec into, although this one is a lot more preference, I think all trees are balanced it’s just more playstyle, you flash like a maniac? Go inspiration cosmic insight with cdr shoes rush and enjoy less than 4 minute flash cooldown etc.
Transcendence holy MOLY this rune got such a nice change in season 11, 5 ability haste at level 5? Sign me the hell up. The ability cd refund is also amazing on vladimirs W since it’s basecooldown is like 30 seconds, allowing you sometimes to pool twice in fights.
 
Nimbus Cloak to make up for the lack of mobility before rocketbelt nimbus cloak helps out so much allowing you to kite and rundown pesky season 10 dashy champs with ease. Optionally gathering storm is also nice but with this rune setup you mostly play for early mid domination and nimbus is also great lategame. My games have been decided 1000x more by having more mobility in clutch scenarios than having 40 extra ap at 30 minutes.
For the mini runes always Ability haste, AP, and scaling hp
 

Build:

You best be prepared to build mejais.
 

Starting item:

Your starting item should be dark seal refillable every game, the dark seal buff now giving hp and 5 extra ap is absurdly good for vlad, random lucky early kills giving 10 ap is also beyond bonkers. Shaving off 350g on your mejais purchase is also essential.
 

First mythic:

Hextech Rocketbelt is by far the best mythic you can go in every game currently, amazing active, amazing components, amazing mythic passive, it’s just THAT good. The dash and ms is a great engage tool, hextech alternator synergises perfectly with your ridiculous ignite electro damage, the passive giving you 5 flat pen is amazing since you can get 18 from sorc shoes and another 5 from mejais since it counts as a legendary, the more flat pen you stack the more efficient it gets.
 

Second item:

Mejais Soulstealer allows you to single-handedly decide whether you wish to win the game or lose it, it’s a must buy and goes hand in hand with this playstyle, one two kills with a mejais, over 10 stacks? Literally the game is a done deal at this stage. Rocket belt mythic passive giving you 5 pen for a 1250g purchase makes it even good to buy at 0 stacks. I have completely 1v9’d too many games to count in the highest of elos because enemies make literally one mistake and die once.
 

Third item:

Void staff third? WTF what if enemies have no mr elite? Well let me tell you about this stupidly broken item that straight up out damages a god damn DEATHCAP even at 30 mr !? ? ? the item is 131% gold efficient, let alone when you pile up your 28 flat pen that you get from completing it. Remember flat pen reduces enemy MR AFTER the percentage, so let’s say someone has 50 magic resistance when you buy your void, magic resistance WH OMEGALUL? 28|40% stats on 50 mr leaves enemies with a whole 2 mr, 2 mr!!!!!
 

Fourth item:

Rabadons Deathcap while not nearly as good as it was last season still will round up your build, if you have just a few mejais stacks and you get these 4 holy items, the game is literally already over. Few champions can experience the delightful feel of going in 1v5 and returning at higher hp than before.
 

Shoes:

Unless you’re rocking cosmic insight and want türbo low summoner cd, sorc shoes are the must go 100% of the time. Why would you need damagereduction from tabis if you oneshot enemies, why would you need merctreads tenacity if you can just dodge with your W 4Head. Sorc shoes penetration just perfectly synergises with the rocketbelt mythic passive since the more flat magic pen you stack the more potent it becomes.
 

What the hell is the last item?

 
At this stage your power is so strong the final item won’t make a big difference, need dps? Cosmic drive, need a second pool? Zhonyas, need spellshield vs evelyn and zoe? Banshees. The itemshop is your oyster, get whatever you want last, I usually like to top it off with zhonyas.
This concludes the way of the gigalords setup and we’ll now proceed to the other setup.

Setup two, consistency king & lategamegod:

This play style was the meta for the longest of time and still remains viable, farm for 30 mins and then fight once and win the game 4Head. This playstyle relies less on your opponents being bad and more so on the inevitable victory that is 300 cs vladimir at the same time it’s also praying that your team doesn’t just perma fight for no reason which kinda happens a lot as well in soloq because people like fighting for no reason.
 

Summoner spells:

Ever thought how if everyone does just one thing the same way people would become insecure to try anything else but that specific way? That’s my opinion on using ghost > flash.
 
With this setup I prefer taking ghost over flash and ignite secondary. Why? Now that ghost’s duration gets refreshed on kills or assists and gives tremendous move-speed while only being on a 182 second cd with cosmic insight (163 with lucidity boots) allows you to have it up at literally every possible random teamfight, the mobility is insane for laningphase as well. If you can kill your opponent with flash in a certain scenario ghost will do the job and more, what do you do vs a vladimir that has kill pressure on your and pressed his nitroboost button? Flash away? Jokes on you this shit lasts 10000 years and he’ll just inevitably catch up.
 
Ghost in teamfights is also ridiculous, pop it right before someone dies and you have like 15 seconds of speed duration, can catchup to literally anyone even foolish galeforce buyers who think they are cool with their mini dash.(bit pixelated)
 
Ignite secondary lets you have some decent kill pressure even with this setup
You can of course go whatever you please, struggling with bully mages? Go flash tp, feel like you can’t catchup to that Ezreal in the backline? Flash ghost is the answer, etc, it’s all viable and just needs playing around.

Runes

Keystone:

 
Phaserush has been Vlad’s most consistent rune since seasons now. It offers a lot of versatility in the sense that it can be used to slide in an extra auto in trades, chase people down, escape ganks easier and of course mainly to slide into the backline like Michael Jackson moonwalking on the rift.
Just like electrocute it’s really easily proccable, just three swift strikes and you’re running like yourprincess runs from apologizing to Tuesday
Even your initial ult cast counts as one of the strikes, so you could ignite ult q and boom you’re already zooming.
 

Minor runes, sorcery:

Nimbus cloak is an insanely good rune for vlad since the main thing you lack is mobility, and the more you have the easier it gets to get even more. If you have a reliable way of proccing phaserush such as nimbus cloak ignite all your mobility issues are fixed.
 
Transcendence just like with the electro page it helps you lane giving you cdr as early as level 5, and if you stack enough ability haste with zhonyas or even legendary double stopwatch you can always do some funky last fight game winning shit like –> pool –> zhonyas –> get asisst so trans ticks in –> stopwatch –> pool again. It’s like 10 seconds of immunity winning you uber clutch games.
 
Gathering Storm what better rune suited for the lategame king himself. All other options like waterwalking and scorch are completely outclassed by this free stats rune. I’d say Vlad is the most efficient champion in the game when it comes to flat ap considering you have ap to hp conversion, absolutely massive ap scalings with damage and healing (wtF), and an amplification on all abilites with your ult.
 

Secondary runes, Inspiration:

Free boots are really good at helping you scale up consistently and the 10ms it gives you on top of regular boots means you just zoom that little bit extra.
 
Cosmic Insight is also amazing at lowering your summonerspells, combined with haste shoes you can get almost 70 seconds off your flash, how insane is that.
 

Build

If you’ve been shocked by going ghost ignite you’re going to be quite surprised by this.
 

Starting item:

Just like with electrocute, dark seal refillable is a beyond bonkers good item to start with, however since we get free boots with this setup going dorans ring is a more affordable purchase as well into a more difficult matchup like Orianna or Syndra. My logic is if you back with ~ 350g you’ll be having to choose either between dark seal or boots, but since boots are out of the equation you don’t even need to think about them so dorans ring is a lot more affordable. At the same time this setup focuses mostly on reaching unholy power as fast as possible.
 

First mythic:

Mythic? Only insecure players build mythic items first.
We build DOUBLE FIENDISH CODEX that’s right. Become unstoppable. Vlad turns AP into a hyper efficient stat already with his insane scalings, so what about a 114% gold efficient PURE ap and ability haste stat? Fiendish codex’ passive is no longer unique so you can stack them.
From experience I’ve felt that anything more than 2 feels awful and going only 1 is also a viable option, although we want to accelerate ourselves and by this I mean let’s say we just pushed out midlane wave and we have some tempo. Raptor camp is up and your jgler doesn’t need them, you take them in 15 seconds total, because of this, the next time you take them you could afford another item meaning you took them 10 seconds in total, the next time 5 seconds and so on and so fort.
Getting pure ap and cdr allows you to do this faster and ultimately accelerating yourself to a point of having 300 cs at 25 minutes and being able to completely devour anyone in sight.
 

Second item:

Since I’m addicted to Mejais I like to buy it second, however with this setup you can skip it, if you fall behind even slightly mejais won’t get the free 5 penetration that you would’ve gotten with a regular rocketbelt build and it becomes really hard to get back into the game. Just remember if you need the power of GOD to win this game, don’t hesitate to buy the holy bible.
 

The real Second item:

Now that you have around ~ 100 ap Rabadons deathcap becomes efficient, even in its pathetic nerfed state it’ll still transform you into an onmipotent being. Deathcap is 92% item efficient with just it’s own AP and gets increased by 20% for every 100 ap so making it at MINIMUM 112% gold efficient of RAW pure AP power which Vladimir makes such enthusiastic work with. Now imagine if you had a mejais with some lucky 10 stacks on it, 136% gold efficient pure ap item combined with this? Oh Lord. Full mejais and dc = 357 ap = 500 hp more for FREE due to crimson pact.
 

Third item:

Most sane enemies when pressing TAB and seeing there is a 200 cs vlad at 16 minutes with a deathcap completed and double codex eagerly wanting to devour their feeble adc souls will attempt to purchase some magic resistance.
Falter their plans by buying an early Void Staff, just like the logic we applied earlier with electrocute, void staffs 131% gold efficiency combined with sorcerer shoes allows you to deal near true damage to low mr targets and to those with more than room temperature IQ who’ve built MR? Well you have a voidstaff, what good does it do them.
 

Fourth item:

Woo! It’s mythic time yayyy!
 
This is the most satisfying thing ever, building a mythic item when you have 3 legendaries all giving you instant mythic passive.
At this stage you can choose pretty much all mythics, need more haste? Go Nightharvester for unrivaled dps, playing against a lot of squishies? Unleash unholy burst with the Rocketbelt, enemies stacked giga nitro mega amounts of mr and you’re having a tough time penetrating through it? Literally buy a Liandry’s, it shreds enemy MR making your voidstaff and sorc shoes deal hyper amounts of damage. Since you have 2 codex Liandry’s is giga cheap at only 2500g and doesn’t eat up another inventory slot.
 
You can even decide to buy something else if you’re in desperate need for it like a Zhonyas or Morrelo, it’s not essential to have a mythic but I highly recommend it leaving it no later than this.
 

Last item (if you were a chad mejais buyer)

Just like the other electro setup, you may go whatever your heart desires as final ap item.
Enemies have a lot of ad? Zhonyas, need dps? Cosmic Drive, need magic res? Spirit or Banshees.
That’s pretty much it to the phaserush build, we’ll be covering when to go these setups next.
 

How to choose between the two setups

I am of the opinion that you can go either setup 100% of the time every game and not need to switch things up to find success, however there are scenarios where one is better than the other.
For beginners I recommend learning just one setup first or your opinion might get clouded by low sample size.
I also have a complete matchup spreadsheet with every matchup midlane in the game
 
If you’re more of the assassin player, wanting to oneshot specific targets and having ridiculously high kill pressure in lane I recommend going electrocute setup.
 
If you more feel like playing an actual controlmage and maintaining 10cs/min and unleashing unholy wrath lategame with zero counterplay then go phaserush setup.
 
In a realistic scenario if you’re laning vs melee champions electrocute is much better for lane and the minor runes will have a lot of effect vs them. You can go both setups in both types of matchups and it’s perfectly viable you just have to be aware of your weaknesses and play around them.
 
Currently I think the meta favours the electrocute setup a tiny bit more since there is a lot of early fighting and lane prio is important to help your jungler. That being said having ghost ignite phaserush means you can join any fight you want since your sums are super low so try both and see which one you like more.
 

Early laningphase and how to play matchups

Level 1 – 5

With both play-styles you want to play as safe as humanly possible with Vladimir pre 6, try manage the wave so it’s always near your tower so you can’t get ganked and are easily able to lasthit. It is ESSENTIAL to have on point last hitting skills, if you do not, go practice tool right now and get 100cs in 10 mins with only autohits. These early autohits really dictate the pace of the rest of the game, same theory with raptors, how much money you have dictates how much money you’ll be able to generate.
 
If your lane opponent doesn’t have teleport (mostly melees) you can play a little aggro and sneak in a quicky succ every now and then onto your lane opponent and eventually either deplete their hp so they have to recall or their mana so they become obsolete.
 
Don’t use your E early much as it mostly hurts yourself more than it hurts anything else, the self damage is always the same percentage so it really feels bad using it early to sprinkle tiny 60 damage blood bolts at the cost of like 100 hp.
 
You may spam Q on the minions as long as you don’t end up pushing the wave to the enemy, what makes vlad really hard to play in high elo is players will freeze the wave as soon as it starts to push vs them and it’s impossible to unfreeze unless you call your jungler to help.
 
If you’re playing vs someone with teleport it’s extremely ballsy to trade with them as if you do they’ll empty their mana on you and hp and just recall and come back leaving you with low hp and unable to buy items and locked in lane, going teleport yourself with phaserush of course halfway counters this awful spot to be in.

Level 1 – 5 early electrocute cheese

This strategy is really really easy to pull off, This video shows exactly how to pull this off, it’s incredibly easy to do with electrocute since you also have taste of blood and ignite if your lane opponent dares to contest this you can just punish them.
 
Basically you want to create a slowpush early, how do we do this? Try to fish for auto attacks or a Q on your opponent, aggroing the minions onto you, since they will chase you let them be pulled into your wave, while you drag them they will not be attacking your minions meaning the wave will push in opponent direction.
 
If you pull this off and just gently last hit the next 2 waves and then push in really hard when canon wave comes you’ll have stacked a MASSIVE ally wave under enemy turret while you have tempo to do whatever you like, recall get amp tome / ward for jungler / invade with jungler / anything you desire.
 
And what about my enemy mid, won’t he follow me and stop me? But how? He’s got 3 waves stacked under his turret trying to last hit them, he can’t just leave that or he’ll instantly lose the game.
 
This concept is very very important to vladimir players as your all ins are often able to 100-0 opponents, so if we do this strategy of stacking big waves at level 6- 9 and dive the lane opponent and they die they lose like 3 waves worth of cs, this is literally unbearably game losing for them and it’s SO easy to pull off especially in low elo. What on earth do you do vs a vladimir who stacked a wave, has an alternator, electro ult and ignite up and is furiously waiting to oneshot you? Literally no counterplay other than going barrier or buying hp / mr.
 

How do I get the wave to push into my direction so I can lasthit?

It’s very simple, most people will hit the wave level 1 like the utter troglodytes they are, just match their auto attacks and leave one out every few, once it slowpushes into your direction all you have to do is not kill the minions and let them be near your turret. The wave will ALWAYS freeze if 3 full hp caster minions are left alive and the next wave’s melee minions don’t go under tower.
 
Like this we can freely scale up to the lategame terror that Vladimir is.
 
My lane opponent has also read this guide and isn’t hitting the first wave? Wtf? If you can, push push push like your pregnant and try get your minions under enemy tower, if this happens the wave will simply bounce and start pushing towards you.
These 2 concepts are the simplest and most essential thing to know when playing Vladimir.
 

First recall

You’ve got around 1000g? You should start to look to setup a recall so you can either buy a fiendish codex (phaserush setup) or a hextech alternator (electrocute setup)

How do we do this?

We already know how to stack waves and crash them under enemy tower, so we simply preform just that, we push the wave out and once it’s under tower run away quickly and recall, the bigger the wave the better since it traps your lane opponent in lane while you get to recall and only lose 1-2 melees.
 
If you don’t want to lock your lane opponent in lane or they have tp or just don’t care didn’t ask, just push the wave out before or during cannon wave since cannon minions can tank like 8 or more turret shots meaning you have tonnes of time to walk back to lane without missing anything.
 
Not missing any cs during your recalls is really essential as Vladimir especially because you can’t afford to fall behind.
 
Vs mages who like to buy lost chapter it’s extremely important you figure out a way to force a recall before they get that 1300g because if they do somehow get that you’re in for a fun cock and ball torture session, especially with Orianna. That’s why if you can recall with 1000g you can get a fiendish and they’ll just feel awful buying a god damn mana crystal.

Post recall

You’ve just walked back to lane, you’re level 6 and have your 1000g item and haven’t lost more than 1 minions worth of exp. What do you do now?
 
Since you have some AP you finally get to have more than cannon minion levels of wave-clear
 
If you’ve got an easy matchup and are not afraid to push out the wave start pushing and looking for things to do on the map. It’s important to ask yourself these questions WHILE pushing so you don’t waste time making a decision when you already have tempo.
 
Can you kill your lane opponent? Dive him.
 
Can you help your jungler invade? Go for it, just remember you’re on a tight time limit if things don’t go well and you’ll lose farm mid with no gain.
 
Can you gank / dive bot/ top? If there is a guaranteed pay off, (know all summs, ults etc) then go for it! Just don’t risk anything, remember if both teams are equal you are likely to win because of vladimirs inevitable lategame scaling.
 
If you don’t have any options, simply ward or clear wards, going out of enemy vision forces your lane opponent to shit their pants and ping ? ? ?? ? ? ? ? where he go? Which takes focus from other players and makes them play accordingly.
 

Midgame

It’s VERY important to go to sidelanes IF
 
Your botlane’s tower died and now enemy adc and sup go mid and try to take yours, since you have fuckall waveclear you can’t hold them away from the tower and end up losing more and more. It’s very important to also not share exp since the support will probably try defend midlane with you, you want to soak up that juicy sololane exp and start exerting pressure in a sidelane.
 
If you see lots of champs in one spot be ready to move asap because a teamfight might break out, although as Vlad maintaining 10cs/min is above everything, you can’t have any less if you want to carry games so some teamfights are just lost causes and don’t hurt yourself more by trying to get there in time.
 
You can generally tell when a fight will happen when either:

• Herald is up and no dragon
  
• Dragon is up
  

 
If ally mid tower is still up and dragon is down and herald is up what do we do?
 
Of course sidelane top and tell your teleport toplaner to go bot and your adc supp to go mid, it’s very likely that a herald fight will start and you wanna be there.
 
If dragon spawns and your team wants to contest that? Sidelane botlane and rotate mid at least ~20 seconds before dragon spawn so your adc can walk up reliably.
 
The only fights you REALLY need to be a part of are for objectives especially dragon, ESPECIALLY ESPECIALLY if you don’t have any dragons at all and enemies are stacking them.
 
Even the most terrible scaling champions like pantheon will be REALLY obnoxious lategame if they get something like an infernal dragon soul.
 
Just one or two dragons means enemy team won’t receive the dragon wincondition at like 20 mins which means the game will go on for longer, what happens if the game goes on for super long? Uh oh stinky poo poo lategame vlad arrived and you just take what you please at that stage of the game anyways.
 

Lategame & Teamfighting

This part of the game is much easier with phaserush and ghost especially with ghost since it also has built in scaling with level, duration and speed.
 
If you have the potential to reach the backline and kill them then that should be your priority above everything, in 99% of the scenarios this is easily achieved with ghost phaserush, since you literally can’t run away from a ghosted vlad. Not even Ezreal with double flash can run, not even kassadin with 4k mana can blink away in a straight line, and god have mercy if Vlad gets his ghost extended with an asisst or kill.
 
If you’re playing with electro and your rocketbelt isn’t enough to get you into the backline then try your best to hit as big of an ult as possible and peel for your next strongest member which is usually the adc. A fullbuild vlad demolishes anything that dares approach.
 
Most fights are extremely obvious when they happen late into the game, they’re either around sieging or around objectives like dragon and baron, you should always be around those when they spawn and farming nearby camps and minions.
 
Even late into the game you want to be farming farming farming, vlad is a super high resource champion, I’d honestly say the highest resource hog in the entire game, not even kassadin needs this much money, but not even kassadin can just engage 1v5 and demolish everyone.

Ability maxing

You want to max your Q first on both setups, however if you are ahead and are going for the double fiendish codex setup I recommend putting 4 points into Q and then start maxing E out, if you do this your E will oneshot the enemy casterminions extremely early, normally only after lvl 11, with this setup as early as level 9.
So Q → E → W and R of course at 6, 11 and 16..
 
If you’re playing vs a melee champ in lane going W level 2 is definetly viable and can catch people off guard like a talon jumping on you without expecting you to pool. It does decent damage and slows like crazy unexpected, good for making enemies eat towershots when they think they can just weave in and out.
 

Combos

There aren’t really many “combos” and it’s mostly just generic efficiency and logical thinking, you make up a lot of things on the fly. Here is a link if you are adamant on learning combos.  
Say we want to proc electrocute or phaserush level 1
Auto Q Auto
 
There is also a multitude of ways you can combo with quick cast, smart cast, input buffer etc.
For the full combo with all sums, what works best for me:
 
Smartcast all abilities, Q for an empowered Q ready,
Charge E –> Flash –> Release E –> Ult –> Q – Ignite
 
Some people like to ult first as it releases E automatically upon pressing R however I feel like it’s a tiny bit clunky and if you release E manaully it’s literally impossible to react to unless predicted.
Super late into the game if you have phaserush you could also if you see enemies clumped up and you know they won’t be for long:
Flash –> R –> E W
 
Since you flash you’ll instantly be able to ult and have nimbus cloak movespeed to make sure your E and W connect with someone, if they do you get phaserush and are able to chase everyone down once you come out of pool, pooling instantly doesn’t matter as much as well since if you hit a fat R it’ll heal you like crazy, this catches enemies off guard a LOT even in high challenger.
 

Skin Choice

Of course the most important part of the guide.
The tierlist goes like this:
 
Marquis: 9/10, Extremely small model, feels amazing to play with, cheap asf, regular ult is sometimes invis vs bigger targets like cho’gath.
 
Bloodlord 8.5/10, A timeless classic with absolutely insane taunting game, instantaneous laugh. Absolute badass voiceline, sounds and animations that make you feel allpowerful but at 1850rp? Idk..
 
Nightbringer: 8/10 Probably my most played, shortish cape, nice sounds and animations, literally invisible ultimate, beyond pay2win, if you’re looking for the most pay2win its probably this one.
 
Darkwaters: 7.5/10 basically budget nightbringer with a giga big nasty looking cape. Also has an invisible ult, arguably more invis than nightbringer.
 
Cosmic Devourer: 7/10 I like the stars aesthetic but imagine making a new skin without pay2win ult, what are you doing right??
 
Academy: 6/10 Kinda slick, not having a cape and being in a weird suit looks good but his hands look literally cancerbig.
 
Soulstealer: 5/10 wtf are these sounds, legit sound like it’s windy outside and has the most ugliest cape in the game.
 
Default: 4/10 bloodlord should be default and this should be removed, legit so beyond ugly.
 
Count: 1/10 Scuffed ass default vlad chroma so bad it should be against the geneva convention.
 
Vandal: dugu/10 You have to say no homo before using this skin, never touch another man’s skin.
 
Nosferatu ?/?? Absolute power.. At a price.
 

General tips

The minute you forget to farm is the minute you’re out of the game, always farm.
 
Taking jungle camps is really fast after double codex
 
Don’t be scared to use ignite generously, if it means your opponent runs out of pots they’re FUCKED since you can just trade 50 hp for 300 of yours and you’ll eventually outsustain.
 
If you want fast results NEVER blame your team, even if they fucked up, what good does it do you to just move on? Try figure out what YOU could’ve done to prevent x from happening
 
If you’re extremely strong and baron is already up, just tell your team to start it with you, you don’t have to finish it but it’s a for sure way of starting a teamfight and making enemies fight you when you want it. Worst case scenario you keep hitting baron, they steal it, you end their lives, gg.
 
The period of where you have crimson rush gets extended by E, Zhonyas, and Pool.
 
For some reason if you have enough cdr and pool as soon as your E ends and start a new channel in pool that E will have no animation and be invisible, not very usable though.
 
If you have any questions, ask me anything I’m always happy to spread light on things I didn’t elaborate on. I also stream of course on twitch.tv/elite500, if I didn’t cover something feel free to ask :D, preferably on the post instead of on stream so others can see it too, I'm streaming as i post this guide so i'll reply to comments in queue
streaming right now again so i'll reply to comments in queue

I think we're all aware by now of the conspiracy that's building in the background of 2077. Most of us know about the mysterious Blue Eyes who appears in The Sun ending to the game. He operates as The Stinger of sorts for (that) ending of the game; He and V discuss a job vaguely alluded to through out the ending sequence and then the ending cuts to V in space charging off towards The Crystal Palace. Cue DLC Hook and credits.
But, let's go back here. This is only the tail end of the conspiracy and where it actually intersects with V's story. Blue Eyes (and some connections to him) crop up multiple times through out the game and, when pieced together, start building a larger picture that runs deeper into Night City than the pockets of most corporats.
I've finished my second playthrough of the game and I've been drafting this post as I play and find more clues. I doubt I'll find everything or might completely dismiss some, but I want to be on the front lines of uncovering this mystery, especially if this will be our Gaunter O'Dim for Cyberpunk 2077. I apologize for the length of this post ahead of time, but I need to summarize a bunch of lore and at least 4 major side-quests; "I Fought The Law", "Dream On", "Full Disclosure", and "The Prophet's Song".
Here's a long essay incoming, but I hope you chooms enjoy and I hope you read through to the end because, oh boy, I uncovered some cool shit!
So, who is Blue Eyes? Who are his contacts? What is his role in the ecosystem of this city?
"I FOUGHT THE LAW"
Let's start with where he most appears in the game; Jefferson and Elizabeth Peralez, political family in the running for Night City's first family. Which I kinda have to summarize their questlines, including the first one which Blue Eyes never appears in. But I'd prefer to go in chronological order and not jump around, so stick with me.
Elizabeth first contacts you for the job "I Fought The Law". It's fairly basic, but the quest tells us she convinced her husband to hire V to look into the recent death of Mayor Rhyne. We get a BD of a cyberpsycho attack by Peter Horvath on Mayor Rhyne. Weldon Holt leaves the room before the attack and then the security gate crashes right before Peter walks in with billions of eddies worth of chrome. The attack is unsuccessful and stopped by Detective River Ward, who was only there because Peter went missing internally at the NCPD and he knew where Peter would go.
When investigating Peter Horvath, his previous boss describes him as paranoid that "probably thought Mayor Rhyne talked to him through the TV" and that the world was out to fuck him. She then mentions that someone "finally saw what he was worth" which cues into how Peter was thrown into this attack in the first place; he had a patron who funded his chrome and the attempt on Rhyne's life. Tellingly, River than goes into a little talk about how clues rarely make sense until put into the larger context, much like we're doing right now.
V goes to the club Rhyne died in; The Red Queen's Race. V sneaks through, takes out some Animals, and can investigate what actually happened to Rhyne. If we read the emails on the office terminal, we know that Weldon Holt arranged for Rhyne to be there. He initially mentioned this to Rhyne during the first BD; Rhyne asked Holt directly to arrange his usual room at the club. So, this doesn't inherently look too suspicious on it's own, but Holt knew where Rhyne would be. We also find out via the Animals Boss there that Weldon Holt is the one who hired them to smash up the club and they're currently waiting around for payment. Further, you can go to the room Rhyne died in, find the BD headset, and put it on... which INSTANTLY knocks V out and they need to be rescued by River (who, btw, takes out any Animals on the property you didn't get to! Ty bro!). They surmise that Rhyne was killed by a virus in the headset. Lastly, we find footage of Detective Han (River's partner) covering up the death of Rhyne. They confront Han, V goes off to the Peralezs, and quest ends.
Of note, finding the BD set is a hidden dialogue option with the Peralezes suggesting, yes, that's the correct deduction to make. You don't get that option otherwise. And V never actually comes to any real conclusion to what happened to Rhyne.
So, let's summarize what we know about the death of our Mayor. Peter Horvath was hired by an unknown Patron who spent a ton of money to turn him into a suicide bomb against Rhyne. They have connections internally to the corrupt NCPD which allowed Horvath to get access to Rhyne, both from escaping NCPD custody and for the security to give him access to Rhyne's conference room. That fails so our mastermind instead assassinates Rhyne at his usual sex club, one that we know for sure Holt knew about. Rhyne is assassinated via malware in a BD porno headset, NCPD comes in an Detective Han cleans it up. Later, Holt hires the Animals to take claim to the club and fuck it up.
Holt is looking suspicious AF rn, but we also don't have any direct evidence and V says as much if you accuse him. Personally, I think it's a little too clumsy if it's him. Holt leaves the room just as an assassination attempt goes down, sets up a sex club appointment for the Mayor where he's successfully assassinated, NCPD covers it up... and then he hires a gang to cover it up more? Something doesn't fit here.
My theory is Holt is innocent. He's a scum bag, but not the culprit here. Why would you EVER give your identity to the Animals you hired to cover up an assassination? The big dumb brutes of the underworld? A name they give up with almost no fight? No, I think someone hired them under Holt's name. And I think they hired them because they KNEW the BD Headset was left behind; Han dismissed it entirely as Rhyne dying of a heart attack brought on during sex. They needed that destroyed to cover the final footprints. It's the only piece of evidence that doesn't have Holt or NCPD's name on it and doesn't fit the narrative that both are pushing. If they're covering NCPD or Holt's tracks, why not delete the emails or footage of Han? And if Holt or Han were trying to push this false narrative, why leave the headset right there the first time?
And, while I have no evidence of this assertion, the Animals are only still there because they're waiting for payment to come in... I think our employer never intended to pay them and left them in the path of V, who is likely to shoot them and tie up the loose end for our mysterious entity. Animals destroy the BD set, V shoots the animals, no trace. And, even if he doesn't, Animals will point V to the wrong person.
No, we've got a third party here. But let's continue so we can finally let our lead actor take center stage.
"DREAM ON"
"Dream On" starts when Jefferson calls V and asks them to help in another case. Long and Short; Jefferson woke up in the night and found a man in a mask (or an implant) standing over him. Jefferson shot the man, only for his head to fry and knock him out. Coming to, he's back in bed with no evidence it ever happened. SSI, their private security, insists that there was nothing on the cameras, no evidence, and nothing happened. Elizabeth claims she slept through the whole thing event.
V investigates the apartment, with Elizabeth giving the tour, and finds a lot of evidence. Elizabeth is kinda dismissive at first thinking V won't find much. First small stuff leading into larger reveals. Let's start small and work our way up.
First room Liz takes us to is the campaign room. She talks about running the campaign entirely out of pocket and having to keep most of their supplies at the Penthouse; "It's cheaper that way". You find a picture of their daughter on the wall and Liz explains that she's off at university in Europe while Jefferson is running for office; "It's easier that way" she says. That phrasing again.
EDIT: A redditor in the comments pointed out that the Peralez are being controlled via drugs in their food as part of the tech. They mention they've been eating fast food lately, explaining why Jefferson was lucid enough to catch the agent and shoot him.
V can look at Jefferson's emails (which Liz slightly discourages them, saying there's nothing there) which reveals a bit more about their campaign. There's a video of the iconic commercial and poster of Jefferson pulling out a gun and shooting a bunch of paperwork. In the email, Jefferson HATES this commercial, but his assistant, Lea Patel, insists on it as it will air in television time slots with action-drama series and catch the attention of voters. Further emails have Eric Boucher, Jefferson's Campaign Partner (Manager?), saying Jefferson has been acting unpredictably lately; presumably referencing one of the next emails. Boucher is confused because they fired Lea Patel together, only for her to continue working and sent him a new ad for approval. When emailed, Jefferson is confused about Lea being fired at all and doesn't remember the event ever happening, even telling Boucher to be honest if he has some issue with her. A final email is from SSI Chief of Security, Wallace, discussing Jefferson's intent to hire a merc to look into Rhyne's death ("Dream On") and they suggest Jefferson drop it or have NCPD or themselves look into it. Private Security just... offering to investigate the former mayor's death? Huh... sounds more like they want to squash the issue to me.
We should now talk about the Peralez's campaign. As you explore the apartment, Liz explains that they're running on a corp free campaign; they want to get Night City out of the control of the corps and do so without ever owing any favors to them. She specifically cites "Night Corp, Militech, and Petrochem" as ones they've denied. Militech and Petrochem come up a few times in other quests but Night Corp is relatively obscure. And they choose that corp to be the first one she mentions? Stands out to me. It also isn't lost on me that we're talking about running a campaign out of pocket and refusing corp assistance... while walking on the fancy ass balcony of a penthouse in Charter Hill- North Oak.
Next room, we find Jefferson's office. Elizabeth and Jefferson both graduated with law degrees from Asukaga University in Berkley. V points out it would be extremely expensive for them both, but Elizabeth says that both got full ride scholarships from the Richard Night Foundation, run by Night Corp. To further fucking cement this moment, there's a Richard Night biography shard on the desk. But we'll drop this for now because I want to get to Night Corp a bit later.
The computer on the office desk has some emails on it sent by Elizabeth. One is between her and Judy where she's asking Judy for help on the original "I Fought The Law" quest and Judy is the one who gave her your contact in the first place. Another is from their daughter kinda asserting the same thing earlier; safer for her in Europe so she's not a target on the campaign trail. And here's the interesting one; Boucher emailed Elizabeth asking why Jefferson changed his mind on Lea Patel. Elizabth says Jefferson explained it to her that it "slipped his mind" and "circumstances changed in Lea's favor" and she asks him to drop the whole thing. She's dismissive and gives extremely vague details.
Next room, Bedroom. Elziabeth's gun is on the table. It's the one Jefferson claimed he fired and scanning it tells us that it has been fired recently. We also find the wedding photo of Jefferson and Elizabeth where she fondly talks about having blue roses because she loves them so much... except the photo's roses are red and V says as much. Elizabeth quietly corrects herself that they only had red roses instead and moves on.
In the hall, we find the blood trail and gun shots in the wall; both covered up hastily. Following the trail, we enter a tv room. The Smart Glass isn't working and Elizabeth says it stopped working recently; not like they use it much anyway. Passing a Tech Check lets us try and fix it... only to be quickly blacked out by it so hard Johnny felt it too. V asks Elizabeth about it but she doesn't know what V is talking about despite having been standing right there. We also find a hidden door in the wall. Unlike earlier, Liz is actually confused by the door but demands V try and open it.
Downstairs we have the security room. Liz says that it used to be her place but "Security had to set up somewhere" and that she had to make sacrifices for this campaign; "it wasn't the first nor will it be the last". One computer has a Welcome email from SSI to new recruits. It details that they have access to all areas except Section Zero, which is reserved for Blue or Black agents and that, should the encounter a Blue or Black Agent (SPECIFICALLY "in the night"), do not interact or acknowledge them. The next email from Wallace mentions an accident where there was a "behavioral anomaly" and "ALPHA" injured a Blue Agent (BLUE-66M) who is in critical and the SSI head is requesting access to Sector Zero to give medical aid. SSI gives Wallace the code to Sector Zero and sends a team to aid. SSI knew about the accident and lied. You go to the second computer, unlock it, and can unlock the upstairs door. On that terminal is a bunch of deleted files (presumably the security footage from that night) and emails discussing "normal maintenance procedure" and further informing security that ALPHA (Jefferson) hired a merc (V) and, should security encounter them, do not interact with them.
Small thing I found interesting, a shard called "You Are What You Slot" is found down here too. It details a fictional assassin who kills and then steals the identity of her victims. Small and doesn't mean much on it's own, but the shards are hinting at the story here; one of false identities and manipulation.
Now, let's get to the main event; the secret room. Inside is a control center. Elizabeth is horrified and feels violated. She shouts that she's not letting SSI anywhere near them, only for her head to start hurting and she tells V to do what he needs to do. She leaves him. Inside the control room is a box of bloody medical supplies. The computer discusses "behavioral norms" for ALPHA (Jefferson) and suggests amplifying "neural dampening". It discusses things similar to Wallace's terminal, but from the other side; ALPHA is displaying odd behavior by hiring a merc, the SSI teams avoided meeting the merc, and then the actual accident that occurred injuring BLUE-66M during regular 'maintenance'. The other side of the room also has another data shard, "Rewriting Synaptic Pathways", basically talking about using tech to rewire the brain a bit.
Following some wires from the control room to the roof, we find a signal dish. Johnny (replacing Elizabeth for conversation now that she's gone), joins in that the tech looks prehistoric but functional and that Militech used it in the war; it requires line of sight to transmit data but otherwise can't be intercepted. We can see the tower and go to investigate. V tells Liz the whole deal; V can suggest that the Van near the tower could be SSIs or that it might not be due to unconventional tech. Liz then itterates twice that it's a stressful campaign time for Jefferson and V should talk to her, NOT him. "Sure, whatever" V and the player dismiss.
(I SWEAR WE'RE ALMOST DONE WITH THE SUMMARIZING FOR DREAM ON, I'M SO SORRY.)
We drive after the van, Johnny is suddenly excited for smashing a corpo conspiracy and iterates that citizens do not choose their representatives, instead they're chosen by "key players" who watch the Peralezes for weaknesses or blackmail material. We arrive at the facility patrolled by Maelstrom and the occupants of our van park, get out, and climb ladders to the roof where they get into an AV that is cloaked to be near invisible (as shown in a couple of vids on YouTube and this subreddit).
At the place, Maelstom is explained; "UNKNOWN USER" contacted them while driving the van for protection to take care of V and then destroy the van. Van's data makes it pretty clear; the Peralezs' minds are being manipulated, new neural pathways are being created, and their memories are being created, changed, or erased. There are also a couple of other names of other test subjects. The data is then erased. We do see an almost flower like symbol before the data is destroyed.
The agents on the cloaked AV CAN be killed and do drop a shard, thought it doesn’t have many more details, merely that they’re contacting HQ to arrange extraction and that the Van’s data should be destroyed and echoing the arrangement with Maelstrom mentioned earlier in their shards.
V calls Liz, Liz wants to meet in person instead of over holo and send him to a Japantown Raman shop (same one that used to be Rainbow Cadenza, coincidentally). Odd choice for an upstanding congresswoman. She says her nerves are shot, the ramen shop is a quieter place to meet than the apartment, and she needs a moment to gather herself since she last saw V, with V even asking if something has happened since they last saw each other. Of note, Liz is stress smoking the entire scene, something she hasn't done until now. She then explains, no, it's been over a longer period of time. She's been watching her husband change and act differently for awhile; he stopped reading, his taste changed, and he even insisted he was an only child and never had a bother when Liz asks about visiting the grave. Of note, yes, Antonio Peralez has a Columbarium Vault, which proves Liz is correct on this. She confesses that she herself has been told by others she's been acting strangely. V says she knew what V would find and she asserts that she doesn't know the who, how, or why, but "they're changing us". Jefferson apparently went on in great detail about a trip she swears they never went on, but she doesn't know if the vacation is a fake memory or if she's the one that doesn't remember.
She saw a stranger in their apartment tinkering with a monitor, only for him to be missing when it was reported to SSI and they looked at the feeds. The next day, she got a phone call from a stranger (whom she refers to by "he") saying that she's walking on thin ice and Jefferson could have an accident. They later erased all data that the phone call had happened. Elizabeth claims she's terrified for herself and her husband's safety and doesn't want V to reveal the truth. V points out "they" could be telling her to say that but it doesn't really change how she feels since she just wants Jefferson to be safe. She tells V to tell Jefferson it was SSI spying for Holt. She asserts she wants SSI out of her roof if they're spying on their sleep. She will take responsibility for firing SSI, but wants Jefferson to be safe and out of that fight. She adds a meeting with Jefferson to his calendar at Reconciliation Park. But, ultimately it's V's choice (especially since she has no idea if she'll remember the conversation) and leaves. Johnny jumps and and talks and mentions that there were talks like this back in his day and worrying about the damage a puppet mayor could do.
V heads to Reconciliation Park to meet with Jefferson. Entering, V is called by an Unknown Number which blacks out V's optics. They claim to know who V is, *what* V is, and what V wants. It doesn't matter what V tells Jefferson, but "don't dare cross that line" and "you're playing with fire". Its a garbled male robo voice, so safe to say it's irrelevant to the owner.
Enter Stage Right, our missing lead; Mr. Blue Eyes. He is standing on a balcony watching the place where we meet Jefferson. In the Scanner, he is labeled "Mr. Blue Eyes", has no known affiliation, is wanted for "SC 370", and is wanted for "Classified". His eyes are electronically glowing blue you can even see from several yards away. You cannot injure him as grenades do nothing and you can't aim at him. Of small note, and I don't know if this ACTUALLY means anything, but his hair style asset is referred to as Morgan Blackhand in the files, but could mean nothing if this hair is actually used by other NPCs. MOST LIKELY THIS IS NOTHING UNLESS SOMEONE HAS FURTHER INFO.
(Plot twist: It meant something. But we'll get there.)
V sits with Jefferson and can reveal the truth; "SSI is on the take from an unknown group to control your lives". V can even point out the absurdity of Peralez being as successful of a politician as he is without any corp sponsors. "They want you to be *their* mayor. Molding you like clay". You can tell Jefferson how to proceed and additional details, but it doesn't matter. Later, Jefferson will send a text and delete your number and so will Elizabeth, who will call you out for telling Jeff. In the end credits voicemails, Jefferson has decended into paranoia about some vitamins Liz gave him which he didn't trust so he sent them to the lab, only to then not trust the lab results saying they're fine. Jefferson Peralez is confirmed the new mayor during Late Act 2 and the major difference is his state of mind at the end game; either hiring V to be on his security staff or descending into absolute paranoia over everything in his life.
Lastly, Johnny appears and cryptically talks about back in his day when they'd talk about rogue AIs. Personally... I kinda completely dismiss this? It comes out of nowhere, Johnny cites NOTHING for why he'd bring this up in relation to the case, and I can't fathom a motive. I’d also point out that this isn’t the only time Johnny is outright wrong. In fact, he’s wrong A LOT in the game. For example, he criticizes V for listening to the Netwatch Agent and that he’s bullshitting you. Except, the agent is 100% correct that VDB did spike V as a suicide virus and Johnny is actually wrong. He also claims he doesn’t know what happened with Thompson after Never Fade Away, but this is a lie because Thompson is flying the AV Johnny takes to Arasaka in 2023. The only connection I can find is "Who is controlling Blue-Eyes" which might make Johnny correct, if just not in the way 'Rogue AIs' initially implies.
So, what actually has happened?
The Peralez family has been molded for a very long time into being the perfect political couple. They got scholarships from the Night Foundation for two fancy law degrees, have successful political careers, and Jefferson is running for Mayor on an anti-corp platform, an insanity for Night City. And he's actually successful at it. During a maintenance service at night on the Peralez's apartment, Jefferson woke up and shot an SSI/Unknown agent making repairs. The Control Booth knocked Jefferson out and they pulled the agent out of the apartment into the secret room. SSI put the Peralezes back into bed and hastily cleaned up everything, but the damage was done and Peralez hired V who uncovered mostly everything.
Elizabeth seems to be initially very upset by the discovery, but wants V off the trail when we meet her next. However, she's not in on it as she's equally a victim to the brainwashing/gaslighting and that's for certain. I think she's a pawn who is either too scared or too programmed to break the rules of movement on this chessboard. It's worth noting that, while the unknown entity threatens Jefferson's life and V's well being, they do not make due on either of these threats. I call their bluff. They have put too much work into Jefferson to abandon or kill him.
But, where else have we heard of this gaslighting brainwash process before?
"FULL DISCLOSURE"
Ok, we're on the shorter end so I don't have to actually explain this quest in full. Sandra Dorsett is a netrunner and a very skilled on at that, actually collecting data from Night Corp. She was kidnapped by the savs we rescued her from at the beginning of the game shortly AFTER she stole this data, suggesting Night Corp was behind it. This data is on the shard she asks you to collect during the aforementioned quest. V has full ability to NOT read it, but let's look at it; "Operation Carpe Noctem" ("Seize The Night" in Latin)
Described in it is an experiment on Night Corp's own employees where they are quietly brainwashing them and getting them to do whatever they want. They specifically cite an empathetic and calm employee who they got to fight a co-worker and then jump from a 16th floor window. The shard ends on mentioning that they're ready to install CN-07 on "our actual target".
I think multiple quests discussing brainwashing and gaslighting is too coincidental to be utterly unrelated to each other. I think Night Corp's actual target mentioned here is Peralez.
So, what is Night Corp?
Night Corp is the most mysterious of the corps in Night City. It currently operates to better Night City via philanthropic ventures, fundraising, community support, and city infrastructure. Basically, while Militech and Arasaka and the others operate in the city, Night Corp basically RUNS the actual city. They're also noteworthy for the level of security they have that even the best netrunners can't get much from them and, since they keep to themselves and seemingly just do city infrastructure stuff, no one really super bothers them. It has been run by Miriam Night, wife of late-Richard Night, until recently and we currently don’t actually know who runs NightCorp.
Originally, they were the Night Foundation, but that requires explaining Richard Night... oh boy, Lore Drop. I'll make it quick as possible.
Richard Night is the founder of Night City. He started as a partner of a firm, but his ambitions grew beyond that to founding "Night International" to build his dream; a city that would be so grand it would make all other cities pale by comparison, Coronado City. A capitalist mecha of opportunity, Night City would be run by corporations and have next to no anti-business policies on the books. Arasaka, EMB, and Petrochem were his first backers and he came into claim of land on the central-California coast; Del Coronado Bay and Morro Bay would be the location of his dream city.
(BTW, irl, Morro Bay, California is a real place. Been there, have family there, go there regularly, kinda cool!).
Despite being a capitalist mecca city and run by corps, Richard Night also dreamed it to be "A sprawling metropolis, free of crime, of poverty, of debt. A place where people could live safely, peacefully, without having to worry about the dire situations that were growing around the world at the time".
However, due to the design plans, Night didn't employ local contractors and instead got expensive architects and builders from all over the world. Local builders didn't like that, they had mob connections, bloodshed started. And soon Richard Night was murdered by an unknown assassin, presumably a mob hitman. The city was renamed Night City in his honor and his dream utopia became to embody everything that was destroying the world. Mob took control and corps didn't give a fuck since it didn't hurt them any until they eventually had to take out the mob gangs, but not in any favor to Night’s dream either.
Miriam Night, Richard's Widow, founded the Night Foundation (later Night Corp) to stick to Richard's Ideal dreams of what he wanted the city to be. They invest heavily in ecological research, alt power sources, civic infrastructure, public works, and charities and scholarships for Night City youth. "They've even managed to stay out of the normal corporate power struggles which tend to plague every other corporation, both inside the city and out. Even the shadowy corporate rumors about them, like having underwater bases in the bay or access to orbital satellites, remain unsubstantiated despite extensive investigation."
So, where does this put us now? We have ONE last quest...
"THE PROPHET'S SONG"
Garry The Prophet is our local crazy man. He spouts off insanities to anyone who will listen near Misty's Esoterica in Kabuki. However, some of his ideas aren't quite as much off the mark as one might think. There ain't no technonecromancers from Alpha Centuri (or Spanish Inquisition) nor is Saburo Arasaka an immortal vampire, but he was correct that Saburo wasn't dead and in fact immortal; via Mikoshi and The Relic.
He send you on a quest to investigate a meeting; he says that his ripper mistuned some cyberware in his head and he can hear their communications. You show up to a meeting between corps and Maelstrom. They say some nonsense phrases and transfer a data shard. Reading it ("Destroy After Reading") it seems like nonsense. But does include the line "The cages of men melt as night descends". You can decode it via a Null Cipher; first letter of every line: “Project Oracle Command Execute Plans”.
We don’t know what Project Oracle is. In real life, secret project or operation names actually tend to be chosen at random and are unrelated to the actual project (you can google funny stories about names that ended up awkward to the actual project), so this could mean nothing. But, narratives tend to give meaning to everything. Oracles are mythical in references and could predict the future or see the unseen. Perhaps perfect prediction via behind the scenes manipulations? Not sure we’ll get answers on this one for now.
Going back to Garry, he's been kidnapped. His protoge is screaming he's been kidnapped "Black suits came by - blue eyes and all". Blue Eyes huh? Further, she claims that they threw him into an invisible AV... Huh, like the one we saw back during "Dream On"? "Night's comin... The eternal night"
So, it’s time to jump us to the final step in our Fool’s Journey: The Sun.
“THE SUN”
The Sun ending has V wake up in their new penthouse apartment (with their love interest if they have one). Checking the computer, we see emails from our dear Mr. Blue Eyes. He wants an answer from V as to the job to the Crystal Palace he has planned and that they’re on a tight schedule for “obvious reasons”. We meet with him at the Afterlife and he talks about the job; Casino security is going into maintenance and V mentions giving him the casino client list. V also asks him to “hold up your end of the bargain”. They never discuss eddies or payment. It’s all in such vague terms. “Your end” or “Obvious reasons”. Smaller point but an email from Vik on the space shuttle also tells us that he’s asked around about Blue Eyes and has nothing; either he works with people WAY above Vik’s paygrade or he’s shady as hell… or both.
I think Blue Eyes knows V is dying (the obvious reasons) and I think the unspecified payment is V’s survival. V always says that they want to come back to their love interest so it’s not a mindless suicide run and I don’t think V would risk it all for nothing but eddies; especially not after Reaper (both versions) paint suicide runs as a horrible terrible thing. To then glorify it in another ending… no, the game is smarter than that.
Your love interest doesn’t seem to be too upset about the situation either. Panam and Judy leave V in The Sun due to their lives taking different directions, but it seems mostly amicable and understanding. They even express desire to see V again because they know V needs to do this job. Kerry, who stays with V in The Sun and expresses worry and also a desire to settle down with V, also seems mostly understanding that V needs to go on this quest. I don’t think they’d be so calm and loving and understanding if this were a suicide run. They know more than the player does.
Further, I think Blue Eyes isn’t after the casino aspect of the Crystal Palace at all. While that’s the major commercial aspect of the station as marketed to the citizen world, the station also has embassies from every nation on earth, facilities from all the major corporations, and is pretty much THE place where all the dark corporate espionage goes down. There’s so much more to this location than ‘casino resort’. *EVERY* corp has space stations and hideaways in space because the Crystal Palace offers it’s own legalities and opportunities that are not allowed within Earth’s terms and conditions. If they want to do some research that would be frowned upon elsewhere and get up to some Top Secret shit, it’ll be in outer space. Night City is controlled by corps and has lax laws, but outer space’s are even more so.
I think the cure V wants is not only on the station, I think it’s what Blue Eyes himself is after, but I’ll get there when it’s time to theory craft about the future.
I think it’s worth noting; Blue Eyes IS IN THE TRAILER FOR THE GAME. Yeah, anyone remember that shot on a shuttle with a guy being burned out from the inside? Yeah, he’s there. In the foreground. *Smirking*. The shuttle also seems like they’re in space.
These events leading to the Crystal Palace and the conspiracy with Blue Eyes are blatant DLC Hooks for the future and suggest a post-game DLC. This isn’t the first CDPR has done so either; Blood and Wine takes place after the story of Witcher 3 and is explicitly incompatible with the worst endings of that game. I think, conceivably, other endings where V is still alive could be roped into this adventure; Blue Eyes merely needs to hire them with the same offer of survival. While The Star takes V to Arizona and away from Night City, I think that choice of location is appropriate as, to even get to space for The Crystal Palace, citizens go from LAX to Arizona for a space port to launch them off Earth’s surface. They could have chosen anywhere else to send Panam and V, but they choose Arizona, huh. I do think Reaper, Temperance, and Devil will be locked out of this future, however, as all make any point of Blue Eyes hiring V irrelevant; there’s no V left to hire/save. MAYBE a rejected Devil ending, but I wouldn’t blame them for not continuing that conclusion either as Devil is one of the bad endings.
So, it’s finally time to really compile a lot of this information into where I think this is going in the next comment below

Content Warnings: Emotional abuse, manipulation, gaslighting, suicidal thoughts
Note: I wrote this horror story about three weeks ago. Since then, enough new horror on top has come to light about this DM to write another story of similar length, involving false rape allegations, sexual predation, demanding and controlling behaviour, turning friends against each other, lying about his day-to-day life and age to appear older than us, spreading false rumours about us to each other, pity-farming, exploiting another very vulnerable player to worship him, and much more. This is a story that just seems to get worse and worse the more our group of survivors talk about it. That said, I hope you enjoy this initial dose of horror. Happy reading.
I never imagined I’d be penning up the next story here. I’ve had my fair share of lite horror stories, sure: the nice-enough lad who wanted to play an excessively edgy Prototype-inspired homebrew class for Waterdeep Dragon Heist, the duergar wizard who had an obsession with Prestidigitation and cleaning soiled objects to the point of screaming at the DM about whether or not a bag of holding had a bottom to it, the barbarian altering his Roll20 sheet settings and macros to add hard-to-catch bonuses to his rolls, etc… but never anything bad enough to justify a full vent piece here.
Yet I finally had one: the worst one, involving me realising a former 'serious, abusive problem player' of our group - someone who wrote up a popular story here ('DM ruins Curse of Strahd by adding his Sorcadinlock Self Insert who’s “coincidentally” also Strahd’s brother') - wasn’t actually a problem player at all, and was right in it about many things. They were totally justified to be as pissed off as they were. Unsettlingly, I realised I’d helped enable horror-story behaviour towards that poor player myself and become an accomplice without even realising it. For reference to u/newt__noot's HorrorStory linked above, we're talking about the same DM here (named 'Rob' in Newt's story).
This is a really big story with a lot to unpack, given this has come from years and years of many campaigns with the same problem DM. I’ll try to condense it as much as I can into sections. For context’s sake, know that we’ve often identified these problems with the DM before and tried to diplomatically raise them as his friend and fellow player, and nine times out of ten been shot down hard for it and made to feel guilty or as if we’re irrational for seeing the issue or thinking of it as such.
So. Context time, my friends. I write wordy, with apologies in advance, so snuggle up with some cocoa and a blanket.
I’ve played D&D for many years. The man who helmed most of my groups is, for the sake of exchanged names, called Alex in this story. For the last five years, Alex has been the first man I’ve met who I can genuinely say I’d take a bullet for. He taught me how to write fiction, be a great Dungeon Master, and though we weren’t of blood, called me his brother. I grew up in a not-so-great household, and so did he. When he told me he considered us that close, I cried. I cried like a baby with joy and felt seen and loved for weeks, and finally knew what a life-long friendship as an adult was supposed to feel like. Only a cult leader could hope to compete with his incredible charisma, and he always became crowned by everyone as the ‘Group Dad’ of every D&D and friendship group we formed. He was only two years older than any of us, or so we thought, but had the incredible wisdom, insight and maturity of a man far older. He was creative, intelligent, and the sort of guy who could give you lectures on random topics for hours and have you captivated the entire time.
For the first few years, he was a wonderful friend. He was supportive, caring, loyal, and we loved him. We all got him gifts and made tokens of affection for him, and he did so back. And he was an incredible writer. His worldbuilding, character voices, NPCs and descriptions felt on-par with Matt Mercer, and I don’t say that lightly. We often fawned over how we felt we had our very own Critical Role at points. However, we had problems - for one, games never lasted. We got through twenty-four in the last three years. Most were Alex’s. A good chunk were mine that Alex convinced me to stop running, despite the rest of the group wanting to keep playing them (except one. One was pretty crummy. We were all okay with that one going). I can name every single one and what they were about, if I sit down to list them. Each and every one lasted either only one or two sessions, or never started at all. In almost every case, we had those sessions, loved them and our characters, and Alex turned around afterwards and gave a seemingly-compelling excuse as to why we couldn’t do that one anymore - or, turned to me when I DM’d, and spent hours justifying to me why my game was bad and how despite the others loved it, I needed to shut it down, ‘be a player for a while’, and make a new one ‘in the future’ (read: repeat this all over again one month from now).
Ironically, this cycle is what’s caused us to finally wake up and realise the true issues we’ve had with our group. It’s only with the sheer exhaustion and apathy towards D&D we’ve developed as a result that it’s become apparent there’s problems. Each of us have made enough characters to, for each player individually, populate entire taverns. Every single one of them was lovingly crafted, had full backstories, completed sheets, planned potential development arcs, roleplay plans with fellow players, theme tunes picked out, the full shebang. Every single one of them has not been used for any longer than two sessions, except for one unusually long-lived game where we mercifully got a whopping 25 sessions… and then Alex said he didn’t want to run it anymore, and wouldn’t allow anyone else to take the DM’ing role on it, given that it was his world and it ‘wouldn’t feel right’ given he wanted to use it for a book.
Whenever we asked to reuse these aborted characters, we were firmly told no, with only one exception ever being made. Alex always wanted to try new genres and ideas not everyone was really on board with, but we went along with because he was a good enough narrator to make them interesting, but even if a new game was in the same genre as the last, reusing characters wasn’t allowed. Yes, even if we hadn’t played a single session with them. Alex made new worlds with every campaign, spending entire weeks worldbuilding down to entire personality profiles and written physical descriptions for every NPC (and insisting this was the only way to DM properly for me, showing me incredible disapproval whenever I used a more improv-heavy DM’ing style and telling me I wasn’t going about it right). Whenever he made these worlds, you had to make an entirely new character to fit that world. No redos. Suffice it to say, all of us ran out of character ideas quickly, and eventually simply didn’t want to make characters anymore.
That’s the core issue, so feel free to stop reading there if that’s already a lot. But, if you’re hungry for more, there’s more, all in the delightful flavours of gaslighting, manipulation and general emotional abuse. God knows I have the need to get it all out in writing at this point, so if you do read on, I hope this is both enjoyable and serves as insight into some serious and harder-to-read red flags than your typical stories. I’ll write up the problems we faced and stories in sections from here.
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1.) “Your game will fail unless you only run it for 10 sessions, tops. Otherwise, it’s doomed. You might as well cancel if you don’t want to do that, because I know your style, and you’re not the sort of DM who can manage a big game.”
Alex runs his games in a very ‘compact’ way, taking modules of D&D and crunching them down to about ten or so sessions. Whenever we raised concerns about this, he’d always insist that this was the way our group needed to run these games, or we’d ‘lose interest and the campaign would collapse’. The result of this was a heavily railroaded, watered-down version of D&D where our characters were funnelled into situations we didn’t truly get a say in.
Alex always seemed to initially support and enjoy my campaigns. He was incredibly helpful from a mentoring standpoint and gave me no end of advice that, honestly, was very good in the early years. I attribute much of my players’ happiness in my games to his lessons. Though the advice became more questionable in recent years, he always told me he enjoyed my worlds a lot and wanted to play in them.
However, in the last two years, five of the games I’ve run have seen the same cycle occur. Alex joins as a player for session one with a beautifully thought-out character and decked-out character sheet. The characters are almost always a bit edgy and reflect some of his personal flaws, but that’s okay. We all often made characters like that. It doesn’t harm anyone and can actually be quite fun, especially for the player, so I allow it. They usually have a good chunk of reflavouring to bend the rules. Again, totally okay; it’s small things like allowing for STR-modifiers on bows, like Pathfinder’s Composite Longbows, or having a rope wound round their starting spear so they can pull it back after throwing. A lot of the reflavours are really cool, and reflect Alex’s talent for building interesting and compelling characters off the bat.
We play session one. It’s usually well-liked with some small issues that get brought up, oftentimes pacing. Alex had us run this routine for a long time of giving reviews of sessions when they were done, rating them out of ten and giving likes and dislikes. If the session scored an aggregate score of 80% of less between all players, whether it was him or me DM’ing, he considered it a failure and made his views known through his behaviour and how he spoke to you afterwards. If session one of my games were very successful and loved by all, he’d stick around for another. If a single session beyond that was ever simply ‘good’ or ‘great’ rather than ‘outstanding’, he’d be very cold, then lose all his enthusiasm and go very quiet about the game.
Then, he’d make excuses about not being able to attend for the next sessions. I’d often try and postpone to accommodate him (much to the others’ frustration when it became more common to postpone than actually play), and he’d quite fairly insist on having the group run without him - but he was my mentor. He was the one who supported me and taught me to DM. Honestly, I was quite codependent on him in an unhealthy way, much like all of us to a smaller extent. At the time, I felt I needed him to see and approve of my campaigns to be truly happy.
Eventually though, it didn’t matter what I did. After enough weeks or months had passed (and especially quickly if I began running sessions without Alex, as per his suggestion), Alex would pop into my DMs out of nowhere and begin suggesting I kill my own campaigns that he hadn’t played in for any longer than the openings.
Alex stuck around in my games for no longer than two sessions, and that wasn’t even continuous. Each time, he successfully convinced me to kill the campaign afterwards. I always hard a sharp reaction of “What?! Why? No!” to him at first, but then he’d start talking. “It had a weak start”, “You can do better”, “They don’t really like your game. I know what they like, so-and-so does this when they like a game and did you see them do that in yours?”, “The other players will understand. You’re the DM, too! Your fun matters!”. Every time, I was steadily made, usually over private voice calls that lasted multiple hours, to believe that I didn’t enjoy my own games. In truth, I actually enjoyed them plenty and loved them dearly until Alex started working that Natural 20 Persuasion of his.
It wasn’t until the fifth one where two of my players, rightfully so, confronted me. I’d run eight sessions without Alex, and they were having a lot of fun with the game. It was the furthest we’d ever gotten in one of my games with Alex hovering around our server. The two players both adored their characters. They had a LOT of roleplay planned out. They had been fawning over the world. They were sick of me letting Alex cancel their games over, and over, and over again.
They demanded an explanation from me. I began very calm and thought they were acting irrationally, running Alex’s reasonings through my mind. Alex was preparing to run his own game (again) and had spent three months prepping for it. Yes, this game later crashed and died after two sessions solely because Alex refused to run it again despite us asking for more, but at the time, Alex had convinced me this was the One:™: that would survive… again. Alex told me it would be selfish to continue with my game if we ran frequently at all, such as a weekly or biweekly schedule, as it would ‘take the focus away from [his] game’. In his words, “the only way you can do this without quite frankly sacrificing this new game I’ve worked on is to run it once a month, if that, maybe once every three months.” He calmly and gently, in that all-too-rational voice, described to me that it’s only natural that players in two or three games at once would naturally like one more than the other. If they liked my game more, his efforts would be wasted. My game had less work put into it than his given I clearly didn’t work as hard as he did on my worlds, which he’d spend countless hours daily for months on, and so it wasn’t fair to him for me to take the spotlight away from his new campaign. Equally, another player was running an ailing game that we both knew and admitted to each other sadly was not going to last due to their personal circumstances, but Alex insisted that I’d be doing that player a disservice by taking the light off their game, too.
My players questioned me, having a hunch that Alex was the reason I’d cancelled yet another game, and I proved them right by parroting this rhetoric to them. They felt extremely hurt I put Alex’s feelings ahead of theirs and challenged every word, and not without reason. As I had the conversation, I gradually found myself stopping short of sentences, losing my train of thought - everything I was repeating from Alex to placate my players was making less and less sense. I felt myself getting angry and upset mid-conversation as I realised I’d killed a campaign that my players and I loved for no real good reason, and upset them and myself deeply as a result. I logged off shortly after.
Without inserting personal problems too much into this, it’s worth noting I do have moderate depression. It’s thankfully on the mend and I’m managing it well. The reason I mention it is because that night was the last time I experienced a severe suicidal episode, and made plans to end my life. I’m a very sensitive person naturally, but my codependence with him put me in a position where I realised I couldn’t get out of it without upsetting my players or Alex. Alex was still in my head after I sided with him, though, and I found myself feeling heart-wrenched and guilty. I saw myself as the bad guy who was damaging Alex’s beloved new game and being a poor friend to our fellow player who ran their own. I took his reasoning as truth, and it made me believe I was a bad enough, inconsiderate person to not deserve to continue my life. Thankfully, I ended up in hospital and got further support and help for my state, and was home by the following afternoon.
Sadly enough, Alex was already then in a state of barely messaging any of us, or taking literally weeks to reply to us. My best friend, who I felt owed me a serious apology but I couldn’t stand up to, never learned nor to this day knows he put me in hospital overnight with his selfishness. It makes me furious to this day, and I’m no longer convinced he would even care if he learned that. We now believe Alex simply never wanted anyone else to DM; or, at least, DM successfully. He wasn’t exactly supportive of our mutual friend’s campaign, either.
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2.) “Considering you clearly can’t take down his challenge alone, like ALL your challenges, my DMPC/the random inconsequential NPC finishes off the BBEG for you.”
Secondly, Alex had a severe issue with deus ex machina. Overpowered supportive NPCs we never asked for help from were used over and over again to make our player characters feel clownish, and destroyed our own hopes for and perceptions of them. He had an intensely-ingrained philosophy of applying JRPG mechanics or design ideas from his favourite recently-played video games into his D&D campaigns, and designed them quite literally as if he was a director on such a project.
Alex introduced various restrictive, arbitrary video-gamey mechanics into his campaigns that destroyed our immersion and punished us for things we had no agency to control. In one recent game, we had a period of time - a week - to resolve a serious incoming invasion of an army upon the capital city of the setting. We were level 3, and this was our first quest as a party, the hook being that we were prophesied heroes who everyone looked upon with great awe and expectations. We were told that for every day we did something to prepare, we would be forced to take an ‘off-day’ where we were physically incapable of doing anything to prepare. No reason was given. Later, we were told a consequence of ‘our actions’ were that the people of the city considered us lazy and were growing restless with the fact we were sitting around and doing nothing, despite the fact Alex had insisted we must spend those days essentially jacking off in a tavern with nothing better on our minds. We weren’t even allowed to roleplay during these off-days or handle downtime tasks. It was a small thing, but each of us felt frustrated. Our characters wouldn’t have sat around doing nothing, or if they did need a rest, they would’ve used that time to talk and get to know each other better, considering they’d only just met and needed to work together on an impossible-seeming suicide mission. As such, we were incredibly unsatisfied. Any attempts at roleplaying were often cut short and we were ushered along very quickly to the ‘next bit of content’ before we could exchange any more than a couple of sentences.
And don’t get me started on feeling useless or clownish. We told Alex out of character that we loved his DMPC’s personality and characterisation, because it was legit really good. Remember, Alex was an truly amazing storyteller and great actor. However, we didn’t want him to one-up us. If he had a DMPC, he was a fellow player and had the same limitations as a player. “I promise,” Alex had told us.
At level 11, Alex hurled a CR 27 custom dragon at us for a chase sequence that we only survived because his DMPC stopped the carriage and cut a mountain in half with his sword. For reference, this is the first time we, as players, had ever faced a dragon in his games, and the fucking thing was more jacked statblock-wise than an Ancient Red Dragon. I saw it. This thing would wipe a level 20 party. It would rival Tiamat. This wasn’t an encounter we were supposed to stumble into, Alex insisted, but beforehand, he had made a hidden roll and made a small awkward laugh as if he’d randomly gotten it on a random encounter table. I’ve co-DM’d with Alex before. Alex does not use random encounter tables. He had the statblock ready to go in our Roll20 while we were level 11, and he doesn’t fill in stats unless he expects to use that creature soon. He often forced us into ridiculously dangerous fights where we’d need outside help to win and could never handle problems for ourselves. This was deliberate, and I firmly believe that, though I have honestly no clue why except to further highlight how weak our party was compared to his DMPC and saviour NPCs.
During the final battle of the first arc of that game, level 10, his same DMPC fought the final boss by himself while half the party were in a basement fighting a much weaker henchman whose CR no longer posed us a threat, then barely escaping a stupidly high escape-DC instant death explosion as a ‘cool set piece’ that felt more like an unnecessary, unfair death trap to ‘up the stakes’. We got up top just in time to see him move into a pocket dimension where he claimed each strike he made against the BBEG was for us. It was absolutely insulting. We had the entire final boss and BBEG stolen from us and relegated to a DMPC’s personal moment. We were cool with DMPCs getting their own arcs and personal moments, but not that, dear fucking god. If it’d been another party member getting to 1v1 the final boss from the get-go until victory then we’d be just as upset. This was supposed to be a group challenge.
Two of our characters never even saw the BBEG’s face during the entire campaign. Before that game died, I’d actually intended to bring it up in roleplay - “huh, what did that guy even look like? I never actually saw him.” Cheeky, I know, but we were all getting upset. That said, Alex proclaimed himself a forever DM (partially now we realise because he never could accept that other DMs don’t tend to run how he does and feels the need to always do it himself), and the guilt of telling him he couldn’t or shouldn’t get to roleplay as a DMPC was too thick for us to deal with at that time. His life was in a shit place. This was one of the few things that made him happy. Nobody wanted to be the one to tell him his precious hero was overpowered and too much. Do that, and you become the asshole of the group. You make things awkward.
Alex’s character was a Paladin-Sorcerer-Warlock multiclass at one point. Roleplay reasoning? None. No, literally none. I can see the Sorcerer side a teeny bit, sure. But he took no Oath or Pact at any point. He just suddenly had the full class switchup after a solo fight scene earlier in the campaign with the BBEG (it lasted twenty minutes. Yes, we sat and watched. Yes, that was more okay to us - again, we approved for him to have some sort of personal moment here and there, but it was frustrating that he was getting the bulk of the interaction with the BBEG even back then). He came to me, knowing I liked my build theorycrafting and number-crunching, and asked me for a powerful nova class build. I suggested it the Paladin-Sorcerer-Warlock and suggested Order Of The Stick if he wanted to know more, but joked that he’d need to be careful given how powerful it was and that it might make us all feel useless. He insisted he’d take it easy, did his research, respecc’d his character from barbarian, and then proceeded to blow everything up whilst acting very stunned and surprised at the table at his own damage output.
He later reclassed to Rogue, but then proceeded to still do similar nova damage by conveniently ignoring the “one Sneak Attack per round” limitation with his self-given magic item that gave multiple strikes, claiming his character ‘had something that let him do that’. This meant his character was frequently dealing about 50 damage per round without crits at level 8 when most of us didn’t have magical weapons yet, and were still using starting gear except for the odd trinket.
He gave himself a Vestige of Divergence (a scaling, personalised unique magic weapon tailored for the character from Critical Role) before any other member of the party. And boy, did he get is EARLY. Very, very early. We’d each been promised one ‘eventually’ at my own suggestion to Alex, and we were all very excited. What wonderful, flavourful and personalised artifacts would we each be getting our hands on? I hoped for a cool cane or walking stick. I was told no, you’re getting a staff. Alright, okay, sure. It’s still going to be personalised and unique and implement my character’s personality and story arcs in its design, right?
Only one other party member ever got one. By the time they did, Alex’s DMPC’s Vestige had already Awakened (hit tier 2 out of 3 in terms of power) and gave him ridiculous abilities and bonuses (+2 CHA, +2 to-hit and damage, additional damage dice on-hit, ranged attacks with 8d6 damage per short rest, other assorted abilities) that elevated him far above the rest of us. Even worse, the one party member who did get one got an axe that was barely better than his non-magical starting one and had an incredibly niché blood-tracking ability that didn’t make much sense for the character’s playstyle, nor would likely ever come up in play more than once. Though thematically suited to the character, by comparison functionally, it was a joke of a weapon.
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3.) “Fiction is reality with the boring bits taken out. So, no downtime, money or resting when you want to.”
Thirdly, Alex’s condensed style meant half of D&D 5e went out the window. Resting was bizarre. During a two-week ship journey across an ocean that our characters were forced into when his DMPC became king of a player character’s tribe (which said player character should’ve been king of at that point, by the way - this is also the player who received the borderline-useless Vestige of Divergence axe), we weren’t allowed a long rest. Why? “For the sake of this journey, you need to be somewhere safe to rest.” We were on a caravan of longboats with sheltered bedding quarters and allied warriors! You’re telling us we can’t have 8 hours to sleep once in those two weeks and get our resources back?!
We never saw money, ever. None of us ever had more than 150 gold pieces in our pockets. NPCs didn’t pay us because we didn’t ‘do quests’, we were ferried along a storyline where we weren’t ever employed by NPCs but instead always chasing a BBEG with no promise of pay except for magic items dropped by powerful foes along the way: like a video game. This wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that in the one game that survived for a time, Alex’s DMPC was given 5,000 gold pieces for free despite having no use for it except getting to say he was richer than the rest of us. Shopping came up exactly once in that campaign and never again, and the party were financially indebted to his character whenever payments came up. This meant many spells, items, downtime activities and such were off the table, and many spells or items were utterly useless. Rest encounters never came up, so Alarm, Leomund’s Tiny Hut and clever trap or camouflage techniques had no use here (but Alex still let you waste spell/item choices on them without a word). We never got to have cushy campfire roleplay as a casual, on-a-whim thing. Considering we never decided where to go or what to do and were told when we needed to seek a tavern for rest, money became an object of ‘how much do you want to have your wallet taxed to stay in this next chapter of Alex’s book overnight?’. Travel was turned into a minigame using yet another arbitrary video-game esque system that, ironically enough, slowed it down to a crawl and made roleplaying with each other during the travel very difficult due to how it split the party and made them go do very different things, very far away from each other.
Many spells didn’t work or had their effects handwaved away. During a travel minigame, we had to hunt for food - our Druid realised they had Create Food and Water prepared specifically because travel was ahead, and happily pitched using it to, as per the spell, create enough food to sustain us. The DM realised this would mean no hunting DC check and no chance of failure because of intelligent planning and expending limited resources, so naturally, he told the Druid that the spell ‘wouldn’t sustain you for the journey’. When the Druid mentioned they could cast it every day, the “you can’t long rest for weeks” bullshit arose again. Oh no, you all slept, you just don’t gain spell slots back or anything until I say so. For clarification, there was no prior discussion or agreement for this random, unexpected switch to what was essentially Gritty Realism long rest rules (or worse than gritty realism, considering the time was often two weeks instead of one for the rest). We were just informed it was the case when we tried to play the game as we expected it.
Many spells were banned at higher levels. I played a Wizard for it, and Alex didn’t like the Wizard. He didn’t like the fact they could bypass his encounters with clever problem solving, despite the fact it’s a core appeal of the class and requires limited resources and creative thinking to do so. Of course, I wasn’t aware of this until we were already too far into the game to make a change, and it wasn’t because Alex said so; it’s because of how he treated the Wizard as a class. It wasn’t until I hit level 13 and was genuinely excited to use spells like Magnificent Mansion for roleplay (my character wanted to give the gift of a custom-designed, comfortable home to our party) that Alex told me such spells were banned. Here’s a few and the reasonings why.
Magnificent Mansion: Our party travelled around in a carriage. I wanted to use this to show off my character’s growing mastery of the arcane and finally prove themselves as USEFUL to the party, giving them the beautiful gift of a comfortable home - something many of them had said in roleplay they wanted someday. It would be wonderful progression and open up great roleply. Alex said no. He wanted the party to be stuck in the dingy, rotten carriage that is owned by his DMPC for ‘thematic reasons’.
Illusory Dragon: One of the few lategame illusion spells. Was told I’d be allowed to use it as a ‘cool final attack’ in combat exactly once, “maybe in a big boss as a combo attack with another player or something, because it’ll become boring if you reuse it”.
Mirage Arcane: Another lategame illusion spell I’d been pumped for for a very long time. Was told no when the time came to choose my 7th-level spells, because shaping the terrain around us would trivialise his travel minigame and make the navigation DC almost impossible to fail - as if it wouldn’t be resource expenditure, a form of problem solving inherent to my chosen class and subclass specialism, and part of the expected adventuring solutions a Tier 3 play party may employ.
In case you can’t tell, being locked out of the most exciting spells in the game sucked a lot of the fun and excitement out of playing what had been becoming my favourite class for me. I had mostly no damage-dealing options and was specc’d to be all about utility, but I was already deliberately avoiding spells like Simulacrum, Clone, Contingency and Magic Jar so as to not be difficult for Alex. These bans were on top of my own self-imposed limitations. Ironically, Alex criticised that my spellbook didn’t have a lot of illusion spells at one point considering I was supposed to be an illusionist. Gee, thanks, Alex. It’s not like my Silent Images, Minor Illusions and Major Images have not worked even once because all your enemies have traits to hard-counter them, and you’ve banned all my interesting options at higher level until I’m stuck taking Chain-fucking-Lightning on my happy-go-lucky pacifist Wizard who doesn’t want to hurt anyone. Even worse, we never saw a single spell scroll or spellbook. I didn’t get to scribe any new spells. I was playing a worse Sorcerer who did nothing of value in combat. I could not have felt less useless or happy in my class choice - it was the first time I’d played a Wizard, and I desperately wanted to play a utility/support caster who helped solve problems without resorting to violence all the time. I realised very quickly that didn’t fit with Alex’s JRPG game design and the railroad forcing us into combat for ‘pacing reasons’. In his words; “No, no. I’ll be real here, think about it - we’ve tried ‘classic’ D&D. You don’t like classic D&D, not really. Our table wants a quicker game with proper pacing, whether or not you realise it now.”
I still vividly recall a pre-established PvP scenario where myself and one other characters (a Wizard and a Druid respectively, Level 10) were placed in an arena with a newly-introduced PC after a character death. This new PC started as a servant of the BBEG and needed to be fought and convinced to fight for us, with Alex and the player working together on an admittedly very cool boss fight sort of deal. We went in with the awareness that the Boss-PC would, in this area, have Lair Actions, Legendary Resistance and the full shebang. We were also clearly informed in advance that the Boss-PC had permission to kill our characters if it made sense.
We beat the Boss-PC by the skin of our teeth, but the debate after was tense. My Druid friend was down and I needed a way to guarantee her safety so I could stabilise her before she died. Afraid my not-so-charismatic Wizard wouldn’t be able to convince the Boss-PC to be nice before she bled out, I realised he had no Legendary Resistances left and pulled what I thought would be the perfect move - Sleep. He had a smattering of hit points left. No Legendary Resistance, no save. It was guaranteed to work, and meant a minute of time to get the Druid up, be safe, and then restrain and wake up the Boss-PC to have a full conversation with them - ask them who they were, have some fun roleplay, make it a memorable moment where they come aboard the team. It’d also mean the Druid’s player would get to be a part of the roleplay of convincing our new party member to join us, and I wanted to include them on this cool moment.
“... and I cast Sleep.”
Instead, Alex immediately guffaws laughing, and so does the Boss-PC player, wheezing and shouting “NO! OOHHHH, NO! NO! NO, YOU IDIOT! YOU JUST KILLED [the Druid]! WHY DID YOU DO THAT? THAT WAS SO STUPID! YOU HAD IT! YOU HAD IT! YOU THREW IT AWAY!”. These two knew my sensitive spot is having my intelligence insulted. I don’t think I’m a very smart person. In fact, I’m very, very self-conscious about it, and they know fully well how much that very-much-not-joking statement would hurt. In the moment, I became furious, horrified that Alex had just twisted the rules to give favouritism to the Boss-PC at the end of the fight to make the Druid’s now all-but-guaranteed death my fault - make me look like a clown who messed up.
I asked to retcon the move if that was the case and said ‘it’s bullshit otherwise’, and Alex immediately dropped the laughter and took on a dark tone. It was a clear-cut ‘you’ve fucked up’ tone. “No. I’m the DM. What I say, goes. If I’m bending the rules, that’s what I’m doing. I’ll let you take it back, but don’t you dare say that’s bullshit. It’s not.”
Alex never apologised for this. The Boss-PC player taunted me after the game and further insulted me by saying it was a stupid thing to do, rubbing it in that it almost got my fellow player’s beloved character killed. Worst of all, I felt like the bad guy afterwards, again. I left a completely heartfelt and self-flagellating apology in Alex’s DMs that was paragraphs long, to which I received a simple, cold ‘Just make sure it doesn’t happen again. It was very disruptive’.
At the time, everyone was on board with Alex, because it was Alex. Of course they were. I would’ve been if it was another player at the table. Now, after we’ve removed ourselves from his influence, the other players have come to see my side of events. I actually posted a story on DnD about it a while back asking for advice on how to better handle DM rulings like that personally, and received no shortage of comments telling me my DM sounded like a bad egg and that they’d be mad too. At the time, of course, I dismissed them and responded with ‘no no, you don’t understand! He’s an AMAZING DM!”.
Later shenanigans involving making our characters feel clownish or useless beyond not being able to ever achieve anything on their own include;

• Retconning in a crowd of people to visibly watch me cast Mass Suggestion, who were not implied to be there previously, so as to make my character HATED by the local community and vilified for mind-controlling their friends - something that got rubbed in both in- and out-of-character.
• Forcing a character to kill an innocent NPC ‘by accident’ with one ever so slightly failed roll, and then not allowing roleplay time afterwards to have the character express their thoughts or discuss the event with their party.
• Usurping the grand reward of a player character’s personal quest arc by instilling his own DMPC as the new leader of that character’s tribe.
• Often designing enemies to be immune to our parties’ spellcasters specialisms (elemental damage and illusions, the latter of which enemies ALWAYS saw through or resisted the effects of, no matter what), eventually introducing an entire faction of mecha-suits that had permanent and infallible anti-magic fields around them
• Ruling the Wild Magic Surge feat actually cancels the spell you originally intended to cast but still consumes the spell slot, hard-nerfing the character for something that was supposed to be flavourful and fun
• Insisting on rolling the Wild Magic Surge table himself, privately, and rerolling whenever he got a boring (read: positive for the playeparty) result - combined with the above point, this made the character an incredible liability to the party and manifested in much of the party not trusting the character to do anything, and treating them like a child, destroying the vision for the character
• Having an NPC shittalk a PC for issues Alex had with the IRL player, breaking the fourth wall and making them feel incredibly unwelcome at the table - yes, we all picked up on it
• Not giving the party any time to roleplay after deeply impactful or personally traumatic events; party member freshly resurrected from the dead for the first time ever? No, you just focus on travel wordlessly for the next two weeks. They don’t get to talk about the experience until almost a month later when I say “you now have roleplay time”, because that makes sense.
• As mentioned previously, not letting some party characters even ever see the BBEG or be personally involved in taking them down. The worst case of this was, as a clue, a BBEG who had the entire module named after him.

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We're not even done yet. Told you this was a long one! I'll post the second half shortly and provide a link to it here.

The NFL draft is officially underway! Events in Mobile, Alabama have officially concluded, capped by another exciting Senior Bowl game on Saturday. Without the combine and limited attendance at pro days, all eyes were truly on the Senior Bowl.
One of my favorite things about this whole week is the opportunity to see players outside of their usual system. From Mac Jones to Nico Collins, there were several players who got a chance to step outside their college roles and showcase their ability to learn and adapt.
If all of that wasn't enough, we had some great moments of coaching captured by ESPN during their broadcast of the practices during the week. Both the Panthers' and the Dolphins' coaching staffs were mic'd up to provide some excellent sound bites. The best by far came from Matt Rhule explaining what it meant to be coachable to all of the prospects.
I did my best to take notes throughout the week watching practice and the game from home. Some of the following is just a running stream of consciousness. To make it a little easier to follow though, I am going position by position. Consider this my notebook recapping the week of action down in Mobile.
Lackluster quarterback group
While the quarterback position was not loaded with talent as it has been in recent years. That should not diminish the display Mac Jones put on throughout the week. He was head and shoulders above the rest of the quarterbacks in attendance. Jones looked sharp, accurate and poised. His accuracy continues to wow scouts and he easily had the best touch on deep passes of any of the six quarterbacks in attendance. Jones has locked himself in as a top-five quarterback. There is a chance he comes off the board before Trey Lance.
Nowhere near the level that Jones played at, Ian Book still had a solid week. He was the second-best quarterback in Mobile, showing his mobility and an increased willingness to hit receivers in tight windows. He is probably nothing more than a mid-round project at this point, but I think he has pushed himself above the likes of Jamie Newman, who had an uneven week, and Sam Ehlinger, who struggled with consistency and ball placement.
Kellen Mond will draw some intrigue as a late-round flier. His upside is clear and there were moments of brilliance mixed into his play. He was by far the best quarterback in the game on Saturday. Felipe Franks unfortunately looked close to undraftable. He struggled with everything from waiting too long in the pocket to taking snaps under center.
Running backs get left out
Neither team had much success running the ball. The two squads combined for just 121 yards on the ground. Some of it can be chalked up to poor run blocking. Some of it points to an underwhelming running back group and an inability for the teams to establish the run.
Despite the disappointing showing, UNC's Michael Carter still found a way to stand out. He looked great catching passes out of the backfield and showed more power than I would have expected for a player his size. I don't know if I would call him a franchise back, but he is closer to that designation than I originally thought.
Virginia Tech's Khalil Herbert had a couple of moments of brilliance, but they were few and far between. Larry Roundtree looked powerful coming out of Missouri, but had some mental lapses. Rhamondre Stevenson left a bit to be desired after finishing his Oklahoma career on a hot streak. At this point, Carter is the only back from this group I could see going before Day 3.
Another loaded receiver class
This time last year is when the draft community started to gush about K.J. Hill, Collin Johnson, Devin Duvernay, Van Jefferson, Chase Claypool and Brandon Aiyuk. We will have a whole new list of draft favorites after this week.
Michigan's Nico Collins and Florida's Kadarius Toney stole the show. Collins showed a real comfort making contested catches and finding pockets of space in the red zone. Toney flashed an incredible ability to generate separation and clear speed to make opponents pay in the open field. Both have room for improvement. Collins' technique is still a bit raw while Toney struggled with some uncharacteristic drops.
They were not alone in grabbing attention though. Western Michigan's D'Wayne Eskridge widely drew praise for his route running and agility. A few corners called him the toughest player to cover all week. Amari Rodgers from Clemson dominated the game, highlighted by a touchdown catch. He is really tough and showcased great speed and agility. Arizona State's Frank Darby also stood out. He got open a lot and showed good awareness for where he was on the field. Both should climb up draft boards following the weeks they turned in.
South Carolina's Shi Smith turned in a strong week as well. He and Louisville's Dez Fitzpatrick were two of the most productive receivers in space. Fitzpatrick made one of the best plays of the game with an incredible catch over the head of North Carolina Central's Bryan Mills.
Quick shout out is needed too for Tennessee's Josh Palmer. He has the size and speed to stretch the field. He still has a bit of a ways to go with his route running and catching though.
Lots to like from the offensive line
No one is going to make an Eric Fisher-type jump, but there were plenty of linemen that improved their stock after the week. It was the interior linemen that drew the most attention. Oklahoma's Creed Humphrey came into the week as one of the top players suiting up. He did nothing to jeopardize that status with a solid week.
Let's talk about the player getting the most hype from this group. Quinn Meinerz stole the show and set Twitter ablaze with crop top jersey and farm boy workout videos. He also played pretty well. This is going to send a lot of people back to his 2019 film at Wisconsin-Whitewater, but he got on everyone's radar after his performance.
He was far from the only small-school player to turn heads. UNI's Spencer Brown was much more on the radar than Meinerz, but watching him tower over fellow top linemen really put his size into perspective. He measured in at 6'8" with 34-inch arms. There is still a bit of refining to do technique wise, but some scouting department is going to fall in love with his intangibles and take him early with the hopes of developing him into a franchise tackle.
Elsewhere, Cincinnati's James Hudson flashed an enticing blend of size and speed. He is a former defensive lineman. He reminds me a bit of Josh Jones. The athleticism is clear but the technique is a bit raw still. Hudson should be solidly in the Day 2 conversation now. I was also impressed by the play of Robert Hainsey from Notre Dame. He has a good motor and a solid base that translates well to impressive play strength. He is still a late-round prospect, but I liked what I saw on game day.
There were a few players that could have had better weeks. While it was out of his control, Jack Anderson definitely dropped on many draft boards after measuring in with 31 5/8-inch arms. He had a solid week of play, but that number alone will scare teams away. Alex Leatherwood also struggled a bit more than most in one-on-one drills. The long-time Alabama starter failed to cement his status as a first-round pick and likely dropped out of the Day 1 conversation.
Deonte Brown scares me as well. After weighing in at 364 pounds, he got beat a few times in pass protection. I worry that he is not quick enough at his size to contend with the speed of NFL defenders.
Top defensive linemen fall flat, tons of depth emerges
I was really excited to see how Florida State's Marvin Wilson, Pittsburgh's Patrick Jones II, Miami's Quincy Roche and Wake Forest's Carlos Basham Jr. would fair with all eyes on them. Roche and Basham excelled, but Wilson and Jones left a lot to be desired. Wilson needed a big week to erase the concerns about his lackluster senior season. He showed flashes of his 2019 form, but did not dominate as he should have in Mobile. Same can be said for Jones. He had a great moment when he registered a sack in the actual game, but he had an uninspiring week of practice.
Roche was nearly unstoppable. He showed impeccable speed off the edge and an explosive first step. Few opposing linemen were able to stop him during the week's one-on-one drills or during Saturday's game. He will definitely be in the mix to go late on Day 1 or early on Day 2. Basham should be in the same boat following a strong week. He looked comfortable with his hand in the ground playing along the defensive line. He showcased versatility and pass rushing prowess.
Game day turned out to be a field day for the defensive linemen. Osa Odighizuwa of UCLA blew past Deonte Brown and nearly forced a strip sack of Kellen Mond. That capped off a pretty solid week from him. Jonathan Cooper of Ohio State had a great practice week and showed up on Saturday as well with a couple of disruptive plays. Pittsburgh's Rashad Weaver dominated along the interior of the line. I viewed him as more of a standup edge rusher heading into the week given his size, but he stuffed the run consistently and made life hell for some interior offensive linemen.
Don't be surprised if Cameron Sample and Janarious Robinson hear their names called before the end of Day 2. They both had stellar weeks and will definitely be sending scouts back to the tape. Notre Dame's duo of Daelin Hayes and Ade Ogundeji both impressed as well. The top of this draft might lack an elite prospect, but there seems to be some solid depth.
Linebackers came to play
This year's group of linebackers stood out in a big way, making tons of plays throughout the practice week and into the weekend. Jabril Cox, a grad transfer from North Dakota State who played for LSU in 2020, was everywhere. He looked comfortable lining up in the slot, covering running backs out of the backfield and making sure tackles against the run. He has three-down linebacker potential and received nothing but glowing remarks from his teammates.
He was not alone. K.J. Britt was one of the most surprising players of the week for me. I was not very familiar with him coming into the week, but he dominated practice and made a big impact during the game. The former Auburn linebacker looks instinctive and confident in the middle of the field. He has the makings of a true middle linebacker. Additionally, South Alabama's Riley Cole showed out in his home stadium. He flew to the football and dropped the hammer in a couple of situations.
It was not an incredibly deep group, but the top guys made a difference. Ohio State's Baron Browning and Justin Hilliard did nothing to hurt their stock either. Both are athletic backers with a nose for the football.
Defensive backs ensure rough day for quarterbacks
This was not the most star-studded group of defensive backs to ever attend the Senior Bowl, but they sure showed up on game day. Minnesota's Benjamin St. Juste stood head and shoulders above the rest. His length was put to good use as he consistently disrupted passes downfield. He has some versatility to play at safety as well, but I think he could be a starting corner in the right system.
Not to be outdone, Richie Grant and Aaron Robinson improved their draft stocks. Both former UCF defensive backs fared very well in one-on-ones. Grant, who typically lines up at safety, showed his versatility by playing on the boundary. He made a number of plays throughout the week and could genuinely be the first safety to come off the board in a class that lacks a clear cut No. 1 option. Robinson won the week with physicality. He does not have all the measurables you would like to see from a starting corner, but there were a lot of receivers who struggled to get off the line of scrimmage when facing him.
I came into the week excited to see Elijah Molden take the field. He did nothing to hurt his stock, but it was his former Washington teammate that caught my eye more. Keith Taylor Jr. showed flashes of being a shutdown corner. He was incredibly sticky in man coverage and made more than his fair share of pass breakups.
Another corner that I think made himself some money is Tre Brown from Oklahoma. He is a bit undersized at 5'9", but he flew around the field and had multiple interceptions in practice. His upside might be limited by his size, but his effort and ball skills still make him a valuable mid-round commodity.
On the flip side, I don't know that any player's stock dropped more than Thomas Graham Jr.'s. The former Oregon corner struggled more than most in one-on-one drills. He got absolutely torched by Demetric Felton biting on a double move. He is not physical enough at the point of attack and he has poor discipline with his eyes. He has the traits to develop into a good corner, but he looks like a project rather than a pro-ready option.
It was a similar week for Mark Webb from Georgia. He could not keep up with some of the speedy receivers on the field. I would not be surprised if he ends up being an undrafted free agent.
A couple of intriguing position changes
One of the great things about the Senior Bowl is that coaches will ask players to spend some time in positions they maybe didn't play in college, but could in the pros. Dillon Radunz got kicked inside to guard despite measuring in well. He had mixed success with the switch. I think he can still be an NFL tackle, but I suppose this would increase his value by giving teams some more versatility.
Another notable offensive line position switch was Jimmy Morrissey moving to guard. He started 47 games for Pittsburgh at center. Much like Radunz, playing another position isn't a bad thing for his versatility, but I think he fits best at center and it worries me he could not beat out Drake Jackson for the starting reps.
The buzziest position change of all was definitely Demetric Felton shifting to wide receiver after spending his career at UCLA as a running back. He played a bit of both positions in practice and the game. He is simply an offensive weapon at this point. He reminds of a player like Curtis Samuel. He will carve out a role on an NFL offense.
And that will do it. It feels very weird to have the calendar turn to February and not be getting excited for the combine. In the meantime, it will be back to film study trying to learn whatever I can before the draft rolls around in April. Be on the lookout for a new mock draft coming Monday after the Super Bowl when the draft order will officially be set.
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https://aftermathsports.com/2021/02/01/2021-senior-bowl-recap-mac-jones-shines-thomas-graham-jr-struggles-and-small-school-stars-dazzle/

Sure, there are plenty of posts from people who applied to a job and got an offer 30 seconds later. Good for them. But if you're on this sub, you're probably running into more difficulty. I did. Job hunting these days is inherently pretty hard, but there are plenty of things I did wrong during my job hunt that could have saved me time and trouble. I'm a 35 year old in product marketing in the bay area, so this advice may or may not apply to you.
Most of this advice is not new, you may have seen it elsewhere. Well, HEED MY WORDS! You should take that advice.
Here are my don'ts of job hunting:
e: Here's the real #1 piece of advice because someone brought it up in the comments: Don't Not Have A Network. The main reason I had such a hard time was I moved to a new city where I didn't have a professional relationship with ANYONE. I think if you're applying without a friend on the inside, it reduces your odds by 80-90%, based on random factoids we've all seen that say 80% of jobs are never posted publicly.
I went to networking events and coffee meetups and blah blah blah, but COVID put a stop to that before I could make much progress. The biggest piece of advice (by far) is just to have a friend who can get you a job. But if you're reading this, you would have done that already if you could have.
Don't try to get by without doing the standard "best practice" stuff.
I spent a while thinking I could get away without making a customized resume for different jobs. I also thought I would probably have the right keywords naturally, and that I didn't have to worry about that either. WRONG. I wasted many weeks submitting poorly optimized resumes and getting few interviews.
What you should do is have at least one version of your resume customized for each job title you're applying to. That means if you're applying for Sr. Widget Fiddler and Director of Widget Fiddling, you need 2 versions.
Keyword optimize each resume version by copy-pasting 50+ job descriptions for that job's title into a tool like Voyant Tools, which will spit out all the most common words and phrases. Find the most frequent ones that seem important and relevant, and work them into your resume, even if it seems weird to refer to yourself as a "team player" or "entrepreneurial".
Don't be bad at interviewing, not even a little bit bad.
Being a good interviewee is a skill. Most of us aren't born with that skill, and most of us are rusty when it comes time to look for a job. I knew I wasn't great at interviewing, but I really didn't want to go through awkward practice interviews with friends, so I told myself people would understand why I was all nervous, and realize I was still super talented and experienced despite my 'rough edges'. WRONG. I blew it on a lot of interviews before admitting that I had to practice, a lot. I did a bunch of practice interviews, got feedback, and I even talked to an interview coach. The latter was expensive, but I think the dose of outside perspective really helped. YMMV.
I practiced enough that I started getting to final rounds instead of washing out in the first couple rounds. It made a huge difference. Practice.
Don't wing it during the interview.
For 'behavioral' questions (i.e. "tell me about a time when..." questions) everyone says you need to have multiple answers memorized for every major category of question. Ugh! So much work. Greatest weakness. Success story. Failure story. Conflict story. Collaboration story. YAWN. I thought I could come up with good answers on the spot. It's "supposed to be a conversation", right? WRONG. I blew it on a couple interviews before realizing I was coming across as both unprepared AND inexperienced.
Sit down and work out your bullet points for every answer, BEFORE you land an interview. Pain in the butt? Yes. But not as big a pain as getting an interview, blowing it, then ending up doing the work anyway.
Don't apply to old job listings.
If it's still up, they're still hiring, right? WRONG. I have found that job listings are good for about as long as fresh bread. You mostly want to apply the day they're posted, 2-3 days is OK, 5 days is pushing it, beyond that, it's literal trash. I started out applying to anything relevant that was less than a month old, and my app-to-interview yield was around 1%. Started applying to new listings exclusively, and my yield went to more like 3%. YMMV.
Don't apply to listings that aren't on the employer's own site.
It's become disturbingly common for 3rd-party sites to steal and re-post job listings they have nothing to do with. You click on a link on LinkedIn or Indeed, and you end up on Neuvoo or some random BS. Don't submit any of your info on those sites. Very often the jobs are expired already, but these 3rd-party scammers are still re-posting them to steal your info. Even if they're not expired, there's no reason to think they actually send your application to the employer.
If you land somewhere unexpected, go to the employer's actual careers section on their site and find the listing yourself. Otherwise you're just giving your info to someone to sell, and the employer probably never sees it. Please report these listings as you go.
Don't be too picky with job titles.
Unless your resume precisely "fits the profile" employers are looking for, you're going to have to apply a lot. I had to apply a lot. At first, I was exclusively applying to one title, because although I didn't "fit the profile" I didn't want to compromise. I ended up getting a really solid job with a different title, after I loosened my criteria JUST a tad.
Have a serious talk with yourself about how many months you're willing to apply before broadening your search, and don't talk yourself out of good jobs because they have the "wrong" title.
Don't be too loose with companies you apply to.
At a couple points in the process, I ended up with interviews at companies that I seriously didn't want to work for. I was playing the numbers game and I would apply to anything with the right title, even if I hadn't heard of the company. I figured if I got an interview, I would worry about the company later.
Difficulty: If you are on unemployment, this can lead to a sticky situation - if you turn down an offer, you legally can't collect unemployment anymore in many places. It's also pretty hard to justify to yourself turning down ANY interview if you actually need the money.
Have a loose idea of who the company is before applying, to avoid those awkward moments.
Don't stop applying until the ink is dry on your offer letter.
My advice is to apply to every suitable listing as soon as it's posted, which could be as many as 10-30 per day depending on your field and geography. If things are going well, you'll also have interviews going on during any given week, which also put heavy demands on your mental energy and prep time.
It is tempting to stop applying for jobs if you are doing multiple interviews and they seem to be going well. You need the time, and one of them has to work out, right? WRONG. It happened to me multiple times - I'd get further along in an interview process, I'd be focusing on prep, and I'd let my application routine slip. Bad idea. If your application pipeline runs dry, it can be another 2-6 weeks before the interviews start flowing again. ABA - always be applying.
Don't get your hopes up. (maybe the most important tip.)
Your mental resilience to rejection and your self-regard are finite resources. They are resources you need to conserve to maintain your overall mental health and good job-hunting habits. Job hunting can burn through these resources like Joe Exotic through a bag of meth. Don't be like me and get emotionally invested in any given job before you get an offer. Don't start picking out all the stuff you're going to buy with the new salary. Don't start thinking of what doors are going to open up for you with this step in your career. Don't mentally pick out outfits for your new commute. Just don't.
I consider myself a mentally tough person, so I should be able to handle the repeated rejection, right? WRONG. If you allow yourself to start caring about a job before you GET the job, you WILL be crushed to bits. Maybe not the first time, but after the 5th, or the 10th, it becomes hard to take.
To some of the newer job hunters I've seen on this sub: Caring about a job from the day you APPLY? Sheer lunacy. You shouldn't even remember where you applied by the time you go to bed that day.
Keep in mind: It's a numbers game. It's not personal. You WILL get the right job eventually, if you keep going. You have to maintain faith in yourself, but hold no hope for any particular job.
In emotional terms, treat it less like a poker game, (where any hand can be a big deal) more like a slot machine (where you care zero until you finally win). No matter how tough you think you are, take care to maintain your mental state, especially during COVID where so many aspects of life are also wearing down our mental health.
Don't be afraid to be a try-hard.
The role I finally got was based largely on a "take home project" used to demonstrate my working style. It was paid, also really long, the minimum suggested time was 10 hours. Usually I put 70% effort into trial projects, because I don't want to bust my ass for a throwaway, and I don't want to look desperate. My thinking is "Well, we're all professionals, so as long as I mention a few of the right things, they'll know we're on the same level, right?" WRONG.
On this one, I decided to go HAM on the project. All or nothing. I ended up putting over 20 hours into it, (the max time they suggested was 20) and came up with a total overkill amount of material, it was probably 20 pages worth, if not more. To give some idea, I spent like 4 hours just doing addressable market sizing, which everyone including me acknowledges is fairly pointless.
Part of the project was also to see how we communicate about our work - they put me on their company slack, so I logged onto it pretty much every day to update them on my progress. It was firmly in try-hard weirdo territory. But it worked!
So I guess my lesson from this is, if you're going to bother with these projects, be the one who turns in the blue ribbon material.
NB: Be aware of "free work" scams where they try to get you to do the actual job without hiring you for the job. If it's pertinent to the actual job and it's more than an hour or two of work, it should be paid. Unpaid trial projects that don't relate to the actual business are OK, but you'll have to decide for yourself how much time you're willing to put in for free.
Don't assume ***anything*** until it's final.
In 3 instances, I got much further than I expected in a hiring process, and in one I was blindsided by a rejection where I thought I was a shoo-in. #1, they interviewed me for the role (up to the final round) even though the job called for an actual engineer and I have zero engineering experience.
In #2, I blew an interview and got rejected. I knew exactly how I blew it, I got the yips and did poorly. So I sent an email reply explaining what I SHOULD have said, and that I really believed in the company's mission, and that I realize I was a poor interviewee, but I was working on it - they actually gave me another shot and I made it to the final round.
In the last unexpected twist story, they actually scheduled a final interview, then CANCELLED IT. I have been rejected for about a million jobs, but I've never been cancelled on. They said that instead of an interview, they would just review my trial project. I couldn't imagine cancelling an interview with someone you intend to hire, so I assumed this 'review' was just a consolation prize and the job was going to someone else. On the day the cancelled interview was meant to take place, they offered me the job. Huh???? Later that day I rode to heck on a flying pig and bought a snowcone there. But I also got a job.
On the other side of things, I was told directly I was the top candidate for a role, the only one who was really qualified, but because of COVID they were putting the role on hold. OK cool, I figured I was a shoo-in once they actually hired for it. Well, they re-listed the job about 45 days later. They didn't reach out to me. I messaged them. They told me I wasn't even going to get a phone screen for it. WTF? They lied to my face for no reason whatsoever? Yep. They did.
The lesson: Do not assume anything! ANYTHING!

In the late 1980s and early 1990s when I was a young teen growing up in far North Austin, it was a popular custom for many boys in the neighborhood to assemble at the local Stop-N-Go after school on a regular basis for some Grand Champion level tournaments in Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat. The collective insistence of our mothers and fathers to get out of the house, get some exercise, and refrain from playing NES or Sega on the television only led us to seek out more video games at the convenience store down the road. Much allowance and lunch money was spent as well as hours that should have been devoted to homework among the 8 or 9 regular boys in attendance, often challenging each other to 'Best of 5' matches. I myself played Dhalsim and SubZero, and not very well, so I rarely ever made it to the 5th match. The store workers frequently kicked us out for the day only to have us return when they weren't working the counter anymore if not the next day.
There is something about that which has been lost in the present day. While people can today download the latest games on Steam or PSN or in the app store on your smartphone, you can't just find arcade games in stores and restaurants like you used to be able to. And so the fun of a spontaneous 8 or 10 person multiplayer video game tournament has been confined to places like bars, pool halls, Pinballz or Dave&Busters.
But in truth it was that ubiquity of arcade video games, how you could find them in any old 7-11 or Laundromat, which is what killed the original arcades of the early 1980s before the Great Crash of 1983 when home video game consoles started to catch up to what you saw in the arcade.
I was born in the mid 1970s so I missed out on Pong. I was kindergarten age when the Golden Age of Arcade Games took place in the early 1980s. There used to be a place called Skateworld on Anderson Mill Road that was primarily for roller skating but had a respectable arcade in its own right. It was there that I honed my skills on the original Tron, Pac Man, Galaga, Pole Position, Defender, and so many others. In the 1980s I remember visiting all the same mall arcades as others in my age group. There was Aladdin's Castle in Barton Creek Mall, The Gold Mine in Highland, and another Gold Mine in Northcross which was eventually renamed Tilt. Westgate Mall also had an arcade but being a north austin kid I never went there until later in the mid 1990s. There were also places like Malibu Grand Prix and Showbiz Pizza and Chuck-E-Cheeze, all of which had fairly large arcades for kids which were the secondary attraction.
If you're of a certain age you will remember Einsteins and LeFun on the Drag. They were there for a few decades going back way before the Slacker era. Lesser known is that the UT Student Union basement used to have an arcade that was comparable to either or both of those places. Back in the pre-9/11 days it was much easier to sneak in if you even vaguely looked like you could be a UT student.
But there was another place I was too young to have experienced called Smitty's up further north on 183 at Lake Creek in the early 1980s. I never got to go there but I always heard about it from older kids at the time. It was supposed to have been two stories of wall to wall games with a small snack bar. I guess at the time it served a mostly older teen crowd from Westwood High School and for that reason younger kids my age weren't having birthday parties there. It wasn't around very long, just a few years during the Golden Age of Arcades.
It is with almost-forgotten early arcades like that in mind that I wanted to share with y'all some examples of places from The Golden Age of the Video Arcade in Austin using some old Statesman articles I've found. Maybe someone of a certain age on here will remember them. I was curious what they were like, having missed out by being slightly too young to have experienced most of them first hand. I also wanted to see the original reaction to them in the press. I had a feeling there was some pushback from school/parent/civic groups on these facilities showing up in neighborhood strip malls or next to schools, and I was right to suspect. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First let's list off some places of interest. Be sure to speak up if you remember going to any of these, even if it was just for some other kid's birthday party. Unfortunately some of the only mentions about a place are reports of a crime being committed there, such as our first few examples.
Forgotten Arcade #1
Fun House/Play Time Arcade - 2820 Guadalupe
June 15, 1975

ARCADE ENTHUSIASM
A gang fight involving 20 30 people erupted early Saturday morning in front of an arcade on Guadalupe Street. The owner of the Fun House Arcade at 282J Guadalupe told police pool cues, lug wrenches, fists and a shotgun were displayed during the flurry. Police are unsure what started the fisticuffs, but one witness at the scene said it pitted Chicanos against Anglos. During the fight the owner of the arcade said a green car stopped at the side of the arcade and witnesses reported the barrel of a shotgun sticking out. The crowd wisely scattered and only a 23-year-old man was left lying on the ground. He told police he doesn't know what happened.

March 3, 1976

ARCADE ROBBED
A former employee of Play Time Arcade, 2820 Guadalupe, was charged Tuesday in connection with the Tuesday afternoon robbery of his former business. Police have issued a warrant for the arrest of Ronnie Magee, 22, of 1009 Aggie Lane, Apt. 306. Arcade attendant Sam Garner said he had played pool with the suspect an hour before the robbery. He told police the man had been fired from the business two weeks earlier. Police said a man walked in the arcade about 2:45 p m. with a blue steel pistol and took $180. Magee is charged with first degree aggravated robbery. Bond was set on the charge at $15,000.

First it was called Fun House and then renamed Play Time a year later. I'm not sure what kind of arcade games beyond Pong and maybe Asteroids they could have had at this place. The peak of the Pinball craze was supposed to be around 1979, so they might have had a few pinball machines as well. A quick search of youtube will show you a few examples of 1976 video games like Death Race. The location is next to Ken's Donuts where PokeBowl is today where the old Baskin Robbins location was for many years.
Forgotten Arcade #2
Green Goth - 1121 Springdale Road
May 15, 1984

A 23-year-old man pleaded guilty Monday to a January 1983 murder in East Austin and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Jim Crowell Jr. of Austin admitted shooting 17-year-old Anthony Rodriguez in the chest with a shotgun after the two argued outside the Green Goth, a games arcade at 1121 Springdale Road, on Jan. 23, 1983. Crowell had argued with Rodriguez and a friend of Rodriguez at the arcade, police said. Crowell then went to his house, got a shotgun and returned to the arcade, witnesses said. When the two friends left the arcade, Rodriguez was shot Several weeks ago Crowell had reached a plea bargain with prosecutors for an eight-year prison term, but District Judge Bob Perkins would not accept the sentence, saying it was shorter than sentences in similar cases. After further plea bargaining, Crowell accepted the 15-year prison sentence.

I can't find anything else on Green Goth except reports about this incident with a murder there. There is at least one other report from 1983 around the time of Crowell's arrest that also refer to it as an arcade but reports the manager said the argument started over a game of pool. It's possible this place might have been more known for pool.
Forgotten Arcades #3 & #4
Games, Etc. - 1302 S. First St
Muther's Arcade - 2532 Guadalupe St
August 23, 1983

Losing the magic touch - Video Arcades have trouble winning the money game
It was going to be so easy for Lawrence Villegas, a video game junkie who thought he could make a fast buck by opening up an arcade where kids could plunk down an endless supply of quarters to play Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids. Villegas got together with a few friends, purchased about 30 video games and opened Games, Etc. at 1302 S. First St in 1980. .,--.... For a while, things, went great Kids waited in line to spend their money to drive race cars, slay dragons and save the universe.
AT THE BEGINNING of 1982, however, the bottom fell out, and Villegas' revenues fell from $400 a week to $25. Today, Games, Etc. is vacant Villegas, 30, who is now working for his parents at Tony's Tortilla Factory, hasn't decided what he'll do with the building. "I was hooked on Asteroids, and I opened the business to get other people hooked, too," Villegas said. "But people started getting bored, and it wasn't worth keeping the place open. In the end, I sold some machines for so little it made me sick."
VILLEGAS ISNT the only video game operator to experience hard times, video game manufacturers and distributors 'It used to be fairly common to get $300 a week from a machine. Now we rarely get more than $100 .
Pac-Man's a lost cause. Six months ago, you could resell a Pac-Man machine for $1,600. Now, you're lucky to get $950 if you can find a buyer." Ronnie Roark says. In the past year, business has dropped 25 percent to 65 percent throughout the country, they say. Most predict business will get even worse before the market stabilizes. Video game manufacturers and operators say there are several reasons for the sharp and rapid decline: Many video games can now be played at home on television, so there's no reason to go to an arcade. The novelty of video games has worn off. It has been more than a decade since the first ones hit the market The decline can be traced directly to oversaturation or the market arcade owners say. The number of games in Austin has quadrupled since 1981, and it's not uncommon to see them in coin-operated laundries, convenience stores and restaurants.
WITH SO MANY games to choose from, local operators say, Austinites be came bored. Arcades still take in thousands of dollars each week, but managers and owners say most of the money is going to a select group of newer games, while dozens of others sit idle.
"After awhile, they all seem the same," said Dan Moyed, 22, as he relaxed at Muther's Arcade at 2532 Guadalupe St "You get to know what the game is going to do before it does. You can play without even thinking about it" Arcade owners say that that, in a nutshell, is why the market is stagnating.
IN THE PAST 18 months, Ronnie Roark, owner of the Back Room at 2015 E. Riverside Drive, said his video business has dropped 65 to 75 percent Roark, . who supplied about 160 video games to several Austin bars and arcades, said the instant success of the games is what led to their demise. "The technology is not keeping up with people's demand for change," said Roark, who bought his first video game in 1972. "The average game is popular for two or three months. We're sending back games that are less than five months old."
Roark said the market began dropping in March 1982 and has been declining steadily ever since. "The drop started before University of Texas students left for the summer in 1982," Roark said. "We expected a 25 percent drop in business, and we got that, and more. It's never really picked up since then. - "It used to be fairly common to get $300 a week from a machine. Now we rarely get more than $100. 1 was shocked when I looked over my books and saw how much things had dropped."
TO COMBAT THE slump, Roark said, he and some arcade owners last year cut the price of playing. Even that didn't help, he said. Old favorites, such as Pac-Man, which once took in hundreds of dollars each week, he said, now make less than $3 each. "Pac-Man's a lost cause," he said. "Six months ago, you could resell a Pac-Man machine for $1,600. Now, you're lucky to get $950 if you can find a buyer." Hardest hit by the slump are the owners of the machines, who pay $3,500 to $5,000 for new products and split the proceeds with the businesses that house them.
SALEM JOSEPH, owner of Austin Amusement and Vending Co., said his business is off 40 percent in the past year. Worse yet, some of his customers began returning their machines, and he's having a hard time putting them back in service. "Two years ago, a machine would generate enough money to pay for itself in six months,' said Joseph, who supplies about 250 games to arcades. "Now that same machine takes 18 months to pay for itself." As a result, Joseph said, he'll buy fewer than 15 new machines this year, down from the 30 to 50 he used to buy. And about 50 machines are sitting idle in his warehouse.
"I get calls every day from people who want to sell me their machines," Joseph said. "But I can't buy them. The manufacturers won't buy them from me." ARCADE OWNERS and game manufacturers hope the advent of laser disc video games will buoy the market Don Osborne, vice president of marketing for Atari, one of the largest manufacturers of video games, said he expects laser disc games to bring a 25 percent increase in revenues next year. The new games are programmed to give players choices that may affect the outcome of the game, Os borne said. "Like the record and movie industries, the video game industry is dependent on products that stimulate the imagination," Osborne said "One of the reasons we're in a valley is that we weren't coming up with those kinds of products."
THE FIRST of the laser dis games, Dragonslayer and Star Wan hit the market about two months ago. Noel Kerns, assistant manager of The Gold Mine Arcade in Northcross Mall, says the new games are responsible for a $l,000-a-week increase in revenues. Still, Kerns said, the Gold Mine' total sales are down 20 percent iron last summer. However, he remain optimistic about the future of the video game industry. "Where else can you come out of the rain and drive a Formula One race car or save the universe?" hi asked.
Others aren't so optimistic. Roark predicted the slump will force half of all operators out of business and will last two more years. "Right now, we've got a great sup ply and almost no demand," Roark said. "That's going to have to change before things get- significantly better."

Well there is a lot to take from that long article, among other things, that the author confused "Dragonslayer" with "Dragon's Lair". I lol'd.
Anyone who has been to Emo's East, formerly known as The Back Room, knows they have arcade games and pool, but it's mostly closed when there isn't a show. That shouldn't count as an arcade, even though the former owner Ronnie Roark was apparently one of the top suppliers of cabinet games to the area during the Golden Era. Any pool hall probably had a few arcade games at the time, too, but that's not the same as being an arcade.
We also learn from the same article of two forgotten arcades: Muthers at 2522 Guadalupe where today there is a Mediterranean food restaurant, and another called Games, Etc. at 1302 S.First that today is the site of an El Mercado restaurant. But the article is mostly about showing us how bad the effects were from the crash at the end of the Golden Era. It was very hard for the early arcades to survive with increasing competition from home game consoles and personal computers, and the proliferation of the games into stores and restaurants.
Forgotten Arcades #5 #6 & #7
Computer Madness - 2414 S. Lamar Blvd.
Electronic Encounters - 1701 W Ben White Blvd (Southwood Mall)
The Outer Limits Amusements Center - 1409 W. Oltorf
March 4, 1982

'Quartermania' stalks South Austin
School officials, parents worried about effects of video games
A fear Is haunting the video game business. "We call it 'quartermania.' That's fear of running out of quarters," said Steve Stackable, co-owner of Computer Madness, a video game and foosball arcade at 2414 S. Lamar Blvd. The "quartermania" fear extends to South Austin households and schools, as well. There it's a fear of students running out of lunch money and classes to play the games. Local school officials and Austin police are monitoring the craze. They're concerned that computer hotspots could become undesirable "hangouts" for students, or that truancy could increase because students (high-school age and younger) will skip school to defend their galaxies against The Tempest.
So far police fears have not been substantiated. Department spokesmen say that although more than half the burglaries in the city are committed by juveniles during the daytime, they know of no connection between the break-ins and kids trying to feed their video habit But school and parental worries about misspent time and money continue. The public outcry in September 1980 against proposals to put electronic game arcades near two South Austin schools helped persuade city officials to reject the applications. One proposed location was near Barton Hills Elementary School. The other was South Ridge Plaza at William Cannon Drive and South First Street across from Bedlchek Junior High School.
Bedichek principal B.G. Henry said he spoke against the arcade because "of the potential attraction it had for our kids. I personally feel kids are so drawn to these things, that It might encourage them to leave the school building and play hookey. Those things have so much compulsion, kids are drawn to them like a magnet Kids can get addicted to them and throw away money, maybe their lunch money. I'm not against the video games. They may be beneficial with eye-hand coordination or even with mathematics, but when you mix the video games during school hours and near school buildings, you might be asking for problems you don't need."
A contingent from nearby Pleasant Hill Elementary School joined Bedichek in the fight back in 1980, although principal Kay Beyer said she received her first formal call about the games last Week from a mother complaining that her child was spending lunch money on them. Beyer added that no truancy problems have been related to video game-playing at a nearby 7-11 store. Allen Poehl, amusement game coordinator for Austin's 7-11 stores, said company policy rules out any game-playing by school-age youth during school hours. Fulmore Junior High principal Bill Armentrout said he is working closely with operators of a nearby 7-1 1 store to make sure their policy is enforced.
The convenience store itself, and not necessarily the video games, is a drawing card for older students and drop-outs, Armentrout said. Porter Junior High principal Marjorie Ball said that while video games aren't a big cause of truancy, "the money (spent on the games) is a big factor." Ball said she has made arrangements with nearby businesses to call the school it students are playing the games during school hours. "My concern is that kids are basically unsupervised, especially at the 24-hour grocery stores. That's a late hour for kids to be out. I would like to see them (games) unplugged at 10 p.m.," adds Joslin Elementary principal Wayne Rider.
Several proprietors of video game hot-spots say they sympathize with the concerns of parents and school officials. No one under 18 is admitted without a parent to Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre at 4211 S. Lamar. That rule, says night manager David Dunagan, "keeps it from being a high school hangout. This is a family place." Jerry Zollar, owner of J.J. Subs in West Wood Shopping Center on Bee Cave Road, rewards the A's on the report cards of Eanes school district students with free video games. "It's kind of a community thing we do in a different way. I've heard from both teachers and parents . . . they thought this was a good idea," said Zollar.
Electronic Encounters in Southwood Mall last year was renovated into a brightly lit arcade. "We're trying to get away from the dark, barroom-type place. We want this to be a place for family entertainment We won't let kids stay here during school hours without a written note from their parents, and we're pretty strict about that," said manager Kelly Roberts. Joyce Houston, who manages The Outer Limits amusements center at 1409 W. Oltorf St. along with her husband, said, "I wouldn't let my children go into some of the arcades I've visited. I'm a concerned parent, too. We wanted a place where the whole family could come and enjoy themselves."

Well you can see which way the tone of all these articles is going. There were some crimes committed at some arcades but all of them tended to have a negative reputation for various reasons. Parents and teachers were very skeptical of the arcades being in the neighborhoods to the point of petitioning the City Government to restrict them. Three arcades are mentioned besides Chuck-E-Cheese. Electronic Encounters in Southwood Mall, The Outer Limits amusements center at 1409 W. Oltorf, and Computer Madness, a "video game and foosball arcade" at 2414 S. Lamar Blvd.
Forgotten Arcade #8
Smitty's Galaxy of Games - Lake Creek Parkway
February 25, 1982

Arcades fighting negative image
Video games have swept across America, and Williamson and Travis counties have not been immune. In a two-part series, Neighbor examines the effects the coin-operated machines have had on suburban and small-town life.
Cities have outlawed them, religious leaders have denounced them and distraught mothers have lost countless children to their voracious appetites. And still they march on, stronger and more numerous than before. A new disease? Maybe. A wave of invading aliens from outer space? On occasion. A new type of addiction? Certainly. The culprit? Video games. Although the electronic game explosion has been mushrooming throughout the nation's urban areas for the past few years, its rippling effects have just recently been felt in the suburban fringes of North Austin and Williamson County.
In the past year, at least seven arcades armed with dozens of neon quarter-snatchers have sprung up to lure teens with thundering noises and thousands of flashing seek-and-destroy commands. Critics say arcades are dens of iniquity where children fall prey to the evils of gambling. But arcade owners say something entirely different. "Everybody fights them (arcades), they think they are a haven for drug addicts. It's just not true," said Larry Grant of Austin, who opened Eagle's Nest Fun and Games on North Austin Avenue in Georgetown last September. "These kids are great" Grant said the gameroom "gives teenagers a place to come. Some only play the games and some only talk.
In Georgetown, if you're from the high school, this is it." He said he's had very few disturbances, and asks "undesirables" to leave. "We've had a couple of rowdies. That's why I don't have any pool tables they tend to attract that type of crowd," Grant said.
Providing a place for teens to congregate was also the reason behind Ron and Carol Smith's decision to open Smitty's Galaxy of Games on Lake Creek Parkway at the entrance to Anderson Mill. "We have three teenage sons, and as soon as the oldest could drive, it became immediately apparent that there was no place to go around here," said Ron, an IBM employee who lives in Spicewood at Balcones. "This prompted us to want to open something." The business, which opened in August, has been a huge success with both parents and youngsters. "Hundreds of parents have come to check out our establishment before allowing their children to come, and what they see is a clean, safe environment managed by adults and parents," Ron said. "We've developed an outstanding rapport with the community." Video arcades "have a reputation that we have to fight," said Carol.
Kathy McCoy of Georgetown, who last October opened Krazy Korner on Willis Street in Leander, agrees. "We've got a real good group of kids," she said. "There's no violence, no nothing. Parents can always find their kids at Krazy Korner."
While all the arcade owners contacted reported that business is healthy, if not necessarily lucrative, it's not as easy for video entrepreneurs to turn a profit as one might imagine. A sizeable investment is required. Ron Smith paid between $2,800 and $5,000 for each of the 30 electronic diversions at his gameroom.
Grant said his average video game grosses about $50 a week, and his "absolute worst" game, Armor Attack, only $20 a week. The top machines (Defender and Pac-Man) can suck in an easy $125 a week. That's a lot of quarters, 500 to be exact but the Eagle's Nest and Krazy Korner pass half of them on to Neelley Vending Company of Austin which rents them their machines. "At 25 cents a shot, it takes an awful lot of people to pay the bills," said Tom Hatfield, district manager for Neelley.
He added that an owner's personality and the arcade's location can make or break the venture. The game parlor must be run "by an understanding person, someone with patience," Hatfield said. "They cannot be too demanding on the kids, yet they can't let them run all over them." And they must be located in a spot "with lots of foot traffic," such as a shopping center or near a good restaurant, he said. "And being close to a school really helps." "Video games are going to be here permanently, but we're going to see some operations not going because of the competition," which includes machines in virtually every convenience store and supermarket, Hatfield said.

This article talks about three arcades. One in Georgetown called Eagles Nest, another in Leander called Krazy Korner, and a third called Smitty's Galaxy of Games on Lake Creek Parkway "on the fringes of North Austin". This is the one I remember the older kids talking about when I was a little kid. There was once a movie theater across the street from the Westwood High School football stadium and behind that was Smitty's. Today I think the building was bulldozed long ago and the space is part of the expanded onramp to 183 today. Eventually another unrelated arcade was built next to the theater that became Alamo Lakeline. It was another site of some unrecorded epic Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat tournaments in the 90s.
But the article written before the end of the Golden Era tell us much about the pushback I was talking about earlier. Early arcades were seen as "dirty" places in some circles, and the owners of the arcades in Williamson County had to stress how "clean" their establishments were. This other article from a couple of weeks later tells of how area school officials weren't worried about video games and tells us more arcades in Round Rock and Cedar Park. Apparently the end of the golden age lasted a bit longer than usual in this area.
At some point in the next few years the bubble burst, and places like Smitty's were gone by the late 80s. But the distributors quoted earlier were right that arcade games weren't going completely away. In the mid 1980s LeFun opened up next in the Scientology building at 2200 Guadalupe on the drag. Down a few doors past what used be a coffee shop and a CVS was Einsteins Arcade. Both of those survived into the 21st century. I remember the last time I was at Einsteins I got my ass beat in Tekken by a kid half my age. heheh
That's all for today. There were no Bonus Pics in the UT archive of arcades (other than the classical architectural definition). I wanted to pass on some Bonus newspaper articles (remember to click and zoom in with the buttons on the right to read) about Austin arcades anyway but first a small story.
I mentioned earlier the secret of the UT Student Union. I have no idea what it looks like now but in the 90s there was a sizable arcade in with the bowling alley in the basement. Back in 1994 when I used to sneak in, they featured this bizarre early attempt at virtual reality games. I found an old Michael Barnes Statesman article about it dated February 11, 1994. Some highlights:

Hundreds of students and curiosity-seekers lined up at the University of Texas Union to play three to five minutes of Dactyl Nightmare, Flying Aces or V-Tol, three-dimensional games from Kramer Entertainment. Nasty weather delayed the unloading of four huge trunks containing the machines, which resemble low pulpits. Still, players waited intently for a chance to shoot down a fighter jet, operate a tilt-wing Harrier or tangle with a pterodactyl. Today, tickets will go on sale in the Texas Union lobby at 11:30 a.m. for playing slots between noon and 6 p.m.
Players, fitted with full helmets, throttles and power packs, stood on shiny gray and yellow platforms surrounded by a circular guard rail. Seen behind the helmet's goggles were computer simulated landscapes, not unlike the most sophisticated video games, with controls and enemies viewed in deep space. "You're on a platform waiting to fight a human figure," said Jeff Vaughn, 19, of Dactyl Nightmare. "A pterodactyl swoops down and tries to pick you up. You have to fight it off. You are in the space and can see your own body and all around you. But if you try to walk, you have to use that joy stick to get around."
"I let the pterodactyl carry me away so I could look down and scan the board," said Tom Bowen of the same game. "That was the way I found out where the other player was." "Yeah, it's cool just to stand there and not do anything," Vaughn said. The mostly young, mostly male crowd included the usual gaming fanatics, looking haggard and tense behind glasses and beards. A smattering of women and children also pressed forward in a line that snaked past the lobby and into the Union's retail shops.
"I don't know why more women don't play. Maybe because the games are so violent," said Jennifer Webb, 24, a psychology major whose poor eyesight kept her from becoming a fighter pilot in real life. "If the Air Force won't take me, virtual reality will." "They use stereo optics moving at something like 60 frames a second," said computer science major Alex Aquila, 19. "The images are still pretty blocky. But once you play it, you'll want to play it again and again." With such demand for virtual reality, some gamesters wondered why an Austin video arcade has not invested in at least one machine.

The gameplay looked like this.
Bonus Article #1 - "Video fans play for own reasons" (Malibu Grand Prix) - March 11, 1982
Bonus Article #2 - "Pac-Man Cartridge Piques Interest" - April 13, 1982
Bonus Article #3 - "Video Games Fail Consumer" - January 29, 1984
Bonus Article #4 - "Nintendoholics/Modems Unite" - January 25, 1989
Bonus Article #5 and pt 2 "Two girls missing for a night found at arcade" (truly dedicated young gamers) - August 7, 2003