Anyone else play? I've recently gotten up to rank 2. I play all characters but my best is probably genji.

I have a copy in my Steam inventory, but I have never claimed / installed / played it.

~SE++

Its addicting. Basically tf2 crossed with LoL crossed with super smash bros.

Been playing with shaz. I've gotten to the point where I don't mix up the hotkeys for the only 2 spells on lonestar, and I'm damn proud of it.

My real life buddies are quite prolific players, but I never got into it.

I wander around lonely and bitching in L2 most of the time. Mostly playing Vinnie because I can feel marginally useful and usually avoid dying too much.

On a side note, Scoop is the devil and ranged snares are garbage.

I tried the demo on Xbox 360 but it didn't do anything for me. Maybe I just needed to play against real people.

I've been spamming Ayla a lot. I think the secret to playing her is relying on her nuke. Sure, you use rage to chase or finish off enemies, but nuke lets you actually win the damage race. Also, the damage over time upgrade on her nuke is super overpowered.

I use AA ayla.

What does AA stand for? Autoattack?

Yes. Wack

This game has brought me to the uncomfortable realization that I would probably kill 3 people in real life if it played music when I did so.

You required an outside catalyst for that revelation?

My greatest sadness is that I am terrible with the squid character in this game :c

I just started playing Awesomenauts sometime last week, when I saw TotalBiscuit playing it for the Polaris Civil War.

I've managed to log in something like 50 hours so far, and it's really fun. I'm still a little iffy about being greeted with a pay wall for some of the characters, but I've looked into it and it might not be quite as bad as I originally thought. (To be clear, I was rather angry at the outset.)

Once I've had some more experience and can say I play well enough with... well anyone, I'd probably like to talk about builds. At the moment, I'm still learning the ropes against the AIs.

TB voices vinnie in case you didn't know.

Oh, no, I knew. Before I bought it I watched three videos that he put out on the game: one at an... E3? PAX? some convention, anyway, back before it was released; then one at its PC release, and one he put out specifically because of Vinnie and Spike. So, I watched probably around 3-4 hours of content before even getting the game.

Then after playing a while I watched the Polaris upload of the Awesomenauts match and realized how badly they were all playing. Still, it did its job since I started playing.

I am done durdling around in the beta. I've had it. Even against bots, the current iteration of the XP system is actively hostile to new players. I'm even considering joining the official Awesomenauts forums specifically to say that.

How so?

Well, I learned I may have an older beta (they apparently pulled the beta around the 25th of October or so for a few days before releasing an updated one), but unless there's a big change I don't think I'll keep playing the beta.

See, here's the great thing about Awesomenauts as a multiplayer game (keep in mind my experience with multiplayer games has been limited to either fighting games {like Smash Bros.} or twitch shooters {like Halo or CoD}, where both genres' entire goal is to kill as many as possible): You don't have to be good at killing. The entire point of the game is to push to your enemy's base, so if you find yourself a little overwhelmed, you can go about sneakily and help make your opponents' turrets fall for the ultimate push. You can go after their team directly if you feel up to it, but it usually requires coordination with your teammates or very careful planning on your part.

But here's the problem with the leveling system as it is in the beta: if one team gets an early kill or two, that not only gives them extra monies to buy more upgrades to kick your ass, but also gives them stat boosts so they can kick your ass harder. If a team gets more kills, they get so much more experience that it becomes impossible to push back and win because they are better at pushing than you, they can take more hits than you, and they can hit harder than you. To a new player who hasn't yet grasped the flow of the game, much less knowing when to get out and when to stay in or the best way to push or even how support or team attacking works, this is simply awful.

To give an anecdotal example, I was just starting to take on lvl 4 computers (80% I guess) and winning maybe 40% of the time in the main game when I decided to play some more beta. In the beta, I turned the computers down to lvl 3 (60%) and was losing 90% of the time, because no matter who on my team died, it always, always resulted in the opposite team stomping all over us because, as I said, it made them harder, faster, better, stronger.