July 2012

Counting Down To MoP #WoW #WorldofWarcraft

First, my apologies for a lack of posts, but my Nana is in the hospital on life support so I haven’t really been in the right frame of mind to post anything here. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been gaming, I have, it’s a great way of relieving some stress and occupy my mind for a bit.

I thought while I waited for GW2 to release I’d be playing nothing but GW1 – but that hasn’t been the case. When Blizzard announced the release date of MoP (September!) I started excitedly playing again. The first week ‘back’ (I say that in quotes because I never really left, having been subbed for the last year) has been eventful. My priest (who I consider my main) managed to pick up a lot of gear in her LFRaid groups, winning both the main hand weapon (healer) and off hand, as well as shoulders, helm, and gloves which I already have in my holy set so I added to my dps spec.

Of course when I ran my warlock and shaman through those same raids they ended up with nothing but the valor points you’re guaranteed for the win, for some reason my priest has always had fantastic luck and the other characters I have not so much.

I mostly just ignore raid chat these days, it’s typically one person moaning about a random other person in raid and what they’ve done to offend them, or moaning that their main could do this raid solo and why do we all suck and how we should vote out half the raid because they’re horrible. When I first doing raids in the raid finder these comments bugged me, my under geared warlock was even voted out once but as time goes on I’ve developed selective reading and pretty much ignore anything said that isn’t mechanic related.

My paladin also managed to inch her way closer to 85, I’ve been 81 for a really long time and just couldn’t find the motivation to push to the end. She’s now happily sitting at 84, and I even healed my first dungeon with her. I’ve spec’d the character as holy / protection, and have been having a lot of fun.

Aside from that, I’ve still got smaller characters that are a blast to play. I’m looking forward to mounts and pets being account wide, and I’m excited to see if perhaps today’s downtime is for the patch that’s on test. We’ll just have to see. In the mean time, it’s really nice having a very simple easy game to play when I only have a short amount of time and need to unwind my brain. I hope everyone has a wonderful week, and happy gaming no matter where you find yourself.

Learning, Exploring, and Learning Some More #EVEOnline

Yesterday and today were glorious days for me in EVE Online, and I’m learning a bit more about the language of the game and how to operate. I managed to bring my Helios to the wurmhole my corp is set up in without dying, that was step one. Wurmholes are awesome, and scary, and awesome. I’ve been in a few on my own and you have to remember some pretty important things. First of all, bookmark, bookmark, bookmark. Also checking to see when a wurmhole is about to collapse is pretty important. In fact the more information you can learn about the wurmhole the better.

So I made it in one piece, and started getting myself familiar with it. The helios is a perfect little ship for this type of operation. I’ve actually never seen a POS before, and had no idea how they worked. For example, I learned you don’t actually dock at them like you do regular stations. You log out within the shield and a minute later you’ll leave the world. Interesting.

This morning came my new challenge, finding the way out. Preferably to some place that wasn’t going to eat me when I left. Probing is getting much easier the more familiar I get with it, and inside of an hour I had located an exit that lead to highsec (you can right click on a wurmhole and get information from it, it will tell you in vague terms whether the hole leads to highsec or some place dangerous and unknown). Found my way out, and back to my ‘home’ in highsec without any issues.

For those who are familiar and comfortable constantly living on the edge in EVE Online, it’s probably not that big of a deal but for me personally, it was an amazing accomplishment and I was quite proud of myself. Next I’ll be trying to bring some POS bits over to the corp for them to use, in specific all those consumer electronics I’ve been producing in my PI routine which are then used in robotics. I went and read through the huge wiki on POS to try to learn exactly what goes into one and how much work they are, confusing, but I’m grasping it.

So far I’ve still not reached out into the pvp side of living in a WH, but I’ll get there. I still prefer invention / manufacturing / PI to the sound of lasers across the sky, and I doubt I’ll ever really be the bloodthirsty sort, but one never knows!

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

The Grim Reaper Stole My Dog #Sims3

I’m a fan of games like EVE Online, Guild Wars (and Guild Wars 2) and even World of Warcraft – but some times I just like to relax and play by myself without having to deal with anyone. For this, I have been a long time fan of the Sims franchise. Sims 3 is a LOT of fun, there’s so much to do, build, and see. I own quite a few of the expansions they put out but there are so many now that it’s hard to keep up, especially on top of any MMO I may be playing.

Still, since I reformatted my PC I had a clean slate, and reinstalled my Sims 3 game, dedicating a few hours to it last night. The last expansion I picked up was the Pets one, and I hadn’t gotten very far with it.

I spent my Sim day in a typical fashion. Became a self employed writer, rummaged through some garbage cans in the neighbourhood (even found an uncommon seed), and tried to get one of the (many) wild horses roaming around to befriend me. Most of them shied away. Eventually I decided I should adopt a dog, and I picked out a great one.

‘Stone’ was his name, and he was a genius. Except two minutes after our introduction the grim reaper paid me a visit and killed my dog! I didn’t even have time to purchase a dog bowl or bed for Stone before he was an urn on my living room floor. GAH.

I gave my sim the appropriate 2 days to mourn, placing Stone’s grave outside in the yard. It’s a cute little dog bone. That night I was visited by ghost Stone, who fell asleep at the end of my bed. A bit creepy, but that’s alright. Once the two days had passed I adopted a second dog, this one named ‘Taylor’. Hopefully she lasts a bit longer. At least I had time to take her for a walk (pictured above). I bet it would make a great country song.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Ship Shopping #EVEOnline #Tweetfleet

The past few days I’ve been spending a lot of time probing, scanning down sites and then exploring whatever it is I’ve discovered. I started off looking for grav sites for mining, but they have been incredibly rare as of late – and (I know, gasp) a bit boring. Instead I’ve spent most of my time hanging out in the NPC sites, battling serpentis. I still haven’t worked my way up to pvp quite yet.

That being said, a few exciting things happened yesterday. First of all, I joined a corp. Yep, my first ‘active’ corp besides the NPC default one that I was placed into. Listening to them in channels is like listening to a whole other language, and so far I don’t quite understand that language – mostly because I’m a ‘carebear’ in game who doesn’t partake in pvp. That’s alright though, there’s no pressure for me to jump right into things and I like that. In fact it’s nice to simply have other people around to communicate with and since I’m a fast learner, I bet it won’t be long before I figure things out.

While scanning down sites yesterday I ran into a few issues. First of all, my Dominix isn’t allowed in a lot of the sites I scanned. I love my Dominix but I feel like I’ve outgrown it some what. So I’m training towards an Ishtar. In the mean time I picked up a Myrmidon which is a Battlecruiser and was allowed through most gates. Of course then I came across a gate that wouldn’t allow the Dominix OR the Myrmidon, so I picked up a simple Vexor which is a cruiser, and completed the system in that. Then I came to a third gate that wouldn’t allow any of those ships through. So I decided – not to bother. I had done enough ship shopping for the day. None of these ships are particularly impressive, but they do really well when they’re fit properly. Playing the Myrmidon is quite fun, it’s completely different than playing my Dominix. It’s a close range ship, and incredibly fast. Of course I’m still pretty dependent on my drones, but that just happens to be my play style.

Mean while, I’m still knee deep in invention and manufacturing. I need to focus on raising my standings with my R&D agents so I can continue moving up the chain and earn more RP/day. There’s so much to do in EVE, it certainly keeps me busy.

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

A Few of My Favorite Things #GuildWars2 #GW2

Ah, another beta weekend come and gone, and the last one before Guild Wars 2 goes live in August. What a long time it seems from now! Of course, that’s more than likely because I’m incredibly impatient. I thought I’d name some of my favorite things that I’ve discovered about Guild Wars 2 so far. Keep in mind I’ve been reading very little about the game, and while these things may not be new to you, they were for me (and brought about a lot of joy). Hopefully some of these things will also be news to others out there, and they’ll bring you just as much pleasure.

1. Vistas. These are Super Mario-esc jumping puzzles that players have to figure out how to reach and I think they’re brilliant. How many times a day in your average MMO do you see people jumping all over the place for no reason what so ever. People love to jump! These vistas are marked on the world map by a set of triangles, and what you’re looking for in game is a hovering map surrounded in white light, typically way up high some place. You’ll have to figure out how to reach it, and then jump to it without falling. Once you’re up there you’ll be granted some experience for finding it, as well as the achievement for finding it, and a remarkable video depicting the area you happen to be in. Beautiful AND fun!

2. Guilds. I learned this weekend no longer are we tied down to one guild! Have a guild of RL friends? A guild of roleplayers? A guild of hardcore raiders that only meet once a week? Now you can be a member of ALL of those guilds at once. You can only ‘represent’ one guild at a time, that is, talk in guild chat – but I still think this idea is fabulous.

3. Dye. I mentioned this before, but I love the way dye works in GW2. You’re no longer collecting bottles that stay infinitely in your inventory or in your bank, but you’re collecting bottles and then unlocking a colour. It does work per character and isn’t account wide, but you can trade / sell the bottles so your alts can unlock them. You can customize colour from the get go with the default palate, and I think that’s fantastic.

4. Crafting. In specific the ‘collections’ tab which holds all of your crafting supplies (well, the raw materials in any rate). This tab will also hold all gems you find (gems are used to socket your gear, basically) and miniatures. I love that my inventory is rarely ever full, because I can just instantly send all my crafting supplies to the collections tab no matter where I’m at. Thank you ArenaNet for letting me play and have fun without the hassle that comes from a full inventory!

I had a blast this weekend, logging in almost 15 hours of game time between Friday and Sunday (I decided not to play Sunday because I knew it would be shutting down in a few hours). I still haven’t decided what I’m going to play at launch, but the beta weekends (the two I’ve participated in) have been an absolute blast. I can’t wait for it to go live! I hope everyone else had a great time playing too.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!