Gaming

What Happened to Playing WoW?

stargrace May 15, 2024 No Comments

I’ve been playing WoW almost exclusively for the past 8 years, and prior to that, off and on. I love the market, and collecting mounts/toys/pets would keep me logging in each day.

Unfortunately I’ve been less-than-enthralled with the course the game has been taking. First with the ‘fortnite-esc’ Plunderstorm event, and now with the Pandaria Remix announcement. My major issue with these events is the time-gated nature of them, and the fact that they remove players from the general world / server and place them in a closed off system. I don’t get to play any of my already established characters, and I feel no connection to them because they are quite temporary, used simply to grind through content and pass it on to my main.

I know a lot of people are very excited about this content, and that’s wonderful. It’s just not for me. I’m also currently in The War Within alpha, but I haven’t nosed around too much yet. Aside from logging in for market reasons, I haven’t really found the desire to play, and I haven’t attempted S4 at all (which is unusual, I eagerly reached 2500+ rating in the prior 3 seasons). I know this feeling of stagnation will pass, it always does, but in the meantime I’m just not spending that much time in Warcraft. I log in each day to list/relist and then I log out. Of course spring has also FINALLY arrived, so I’m spending lots of time outside with the minions and getting the garden ready. This year it went from winter->summer in the span of a week, something I’m slowly getting used to as being the new ‘norm’.

In any case, I just wanted to let my WoW readers that I am still around, keeping an ear to the ground on what is happening out there – and I still love the game, but it’s a good time to take a little break before the fun starts again in TWW.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

EVE Gaming

Waiting on Some Skills

stargrace May 14, 2024 No Comments

This week has been an (unintentional) expensive one. I lost two ships (one to pvp, one to an NPC) that I had to replace, and I didn’t have a whole lot of ‘free’ time to try to make that back. I also bought a bunch of skill injectors thinking I would take the skills from my 3rd account (which I plan on letting lapse to alpha, as I’m not really keen on keeping 3 accounts active) and distribute them elsewhere, or sell them – and then realized that there’s a 5.5m buffer for siphoning those skill points – AFTER I purchased 7 extractors. I did manage to fill 3 of them up, but the others will have to wait. That account does have a bit more time remaining on it, and I’ll just slowly siphon as I gain 500m points so it’s not a complete waste, but it is a lot longer of a wait than I expected and has become a long term investment.

That will leave me with two active accounts. One has my ‘main’ and two PI characters, and the other has my signal cartel character, an industry character (what industry, I know people are less than enthused at the current state of things as they’re selling for barely-profits these days) and I still have one empty character slot. Undecided as to what I’ll do with that yet. My PI characters are nicely established for what they do, I bought two MCT (multi character training?) certificates a month ago and that was just enough to get them situated with 5 planets at max CPU. The 6th one can wait.

I think with PI alone I’ll be able to pay for one of my accounts, or at least mildly supplemented. The goal is to pay for one of my accounts with traditional subscription (when it goes on sale) and pay for the second one with ISK. I don’t want ALL of my time in game to be devoted to making ISK because that gets old fast and feels like a job and encourages burn out – but I do really enjoy the market/industry aspect of the game so I don’t mind spending my time on it.

I’ve got some thoughts on the expansion coming in June, but this post is long enough so I’ll save that for tomorrow. As always, fly your way! o7

EVE Gaming

Deciding what to Train

stargrace May 13, 2024 No Comments

Right now I have three active accounts, but I want to downgrade to just two active, eventually. I’m trying to figure out where I want my points to go, who I want doing certain things, and all of that good stuff. I did set up two PI alts (along with my ‘main’) but they still need to get their planets set up. It’s a long process, and while I know once it’s set up, it’s good, I still need to find the energy to get it started.

There’s never a lack of things to train towards, and it all takes time. I’m trying to be patient, but that’s not exactly my strong suite. That’s why you bring in alts, so they can specialize in things. It’s fine to have one character and try to ‘do it all’ too, but it’s not very optimal.

I have characters who are specializing in market, others who are doing PI, and another doing industry type things. Then of course there’s the ships and deciding which one to focus on. I haven’t had much time for exploration lately, but I hope to fill the week with it. We’ll see!

Fly your way. o7

EVE Gaming

RNG? We’ve got LOTS of That!

stargrace May 12, 2024 No Comments

Exploration is one of my favourite things in EVE – it’s not the only thing I enjoy, but it makes up a huge portion. Hacking & data sites are a part of that, and some days I have a big payoff (like the one above, it took me maybe 20 minutes) and other days it’s much quieter. I think that’s one of the reasons I like it – I never quite know what I’m going to be in store for. Yesterday was one of the best ISK runs I had done – in less than an hour I had looted over 180M ISK worth of items, all from a single C2 WH that I stumbled into – YAY!

After I travelled to a few more wormholes, but they were pretty busy so after scanning down the signatures I moved on. I come across all sorts of people, some are just doing anomalies, some are harvesting, others are looking for a fight. I like that there are very different methods of gameplay available to everyone.

I’ve stopped trying to chase the meta when it comes to the Capsuleer Day event – it’s just not fun. I did get a few prizes from it at least, but unless you’re buying the materials and a lot of time to work up the ranks, I just find it to be too much work vs. time vs. fun. The daily log in bonuses have been nice at least.

As always, fly your way! o7

EVE Gaming

Suitcase Challenge Day 5: Let’s Eat Pi

stargrace May 11, 2024 No Comments

Today I learned you can set up PI while cloaked in an Epithal – interesting! I’ll probably upgrade this to a blockade runner down the road, but for now I think it should work for what I’m doing. I set up four production planets, a factory planet, and a spare one for resources. I do have two other alts who are trained in PI that I might haul out here, but they’d also need to add cloaking to their list of skills, and that one takes a bit of time. Or, I could just be brave and attempt this mission uncloaked! Which sort of seems like it would be a death sentence. I’m hoping to collect PI each day, and run it through to highsec once a week. It will of course depend on where the HS entrance is and what’s going on, and all that good stuff.

For anyone else who is attempting to set up PI in a WH that they don’t ‘own’ I have one bit of advice – check out the POCO first to see if you have access. There’s tons of these around but access is either limited, restricted, or 100% taxes. A lot are from abandoned corporations that are no longer active, too. You CAN blow up someone else’ POCO, but it takes forever, or you hire someone and that’s not cheap. Then you need to install your own POCO which is a whole other adventure. You CAN also technically jettison your items into space – but that has a few issues, number one, the amount of items you can send off at a time is limited. Number two, there is a 10% tax on this for every can you jettison. Keep in mind that you could also have your access removed. It might not be a bad idea to contact the owners and see if they can give you access although that might also just give you away.

Trying to find content isn’t difficult, but prioritizing the content and trying to figure out exactly what I want to do and when I can do it, that is the challenge so far. I’ve seen a few people pop into the system, but they didn’t stick around to chatter. Ah well!

Fly your way! o7

What Happened to Playing WoW?

Waiting on Some Skills

Deciding what to Train

RNG? We’ve got LOTS of That!

Suitcase Challenge Day 5: Let’s Eat Pi

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