Feverish gaming updates

How is it going? Well I hope… on my end I’ve been visited by the plaguefather himself and got a super fun cold for the past week that has left in a that weird haze where you’re not sure of what’s going on exactly. Here’s what I’ve been up to during the those fantastic delirious moments.

The Secret World

I’ve moved on from Egypt first zone and I’m now starting City of the Sun God, the second zone. I still have to run the Ankh, the first zone dungeon at some point but so far no luck, I suspect normal mode dungeons past the first two are rarely run anymore. The first zone was fun enough and I’m hoping City of the Sun God will be as good. So far it’s a bit weird but I’m willing to give it a chance.

My gear is now solidly QL8 and I’m starting to edge on QL9 and 10 so I should be done with the main part of gearing soonish and thus be able to go back to the first zones to clear up missions I wasn’t able to do due to them being for QL10 gear people.

Blade and Soul

That one is a bit of a surprised and I picked it up during a fever induced blackout on Saturday morning. To my great surprise I’m enjoying it a lot even though I don’t think I’ll stick with it long term. It’s definitively a Korean game and I think I’m just enjoying the different cultural setting and the high action fights.  Like all true Korean games though, it’s highly rng based and there’s a good amount of grind to be found. Still, it’s a nice distraction.

FFXIV

I’ve been slowly getting back into the game after a friend of mine started playing recently and it’s been fun so far. My focus is mostly on the new anima weapon grind and I’m now on the “gather a ton of tokens and mats” part of the current chain which is the last one available for now. But what a grind it is, it’s right up there with the dungeon drop part of last chain which was pretty insane. This time you have to gather 80 tokens and 16 crafted items and these tokens are not easy to come by. So far I’ve picked up 5 of them by focusing on buying them with tomes which means running tons of dungeons but since I like doing that, not so bad. It’s a grand total of 27200 tomes split evenly between Tome of Poetics and Law so that means I have 23800 tomes to go… easy right?

Darkest Dungeon

I’ve also been playing quite a bit of Darkest Dungeon since its official launch and I’m not at the awkward transition period between Veteran dungeons and Champion level dungeons. I’ve tried doing Champion levels a few times already and all I managed to achieve was getting my ass kicked. I know it’s a matter of managing to get a foot in and build on that but so far I haven’t managed to make a real dent in it.

So that’s been my playing time last week. With Xcom2 coming out this weekend I’m sure that will take the vast majority of my time and I’ll likely do another guide like I did with the first one as soon as I can.

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Quick gaming update

Oh hello everyone!

Sorry for the recent quiet but work has been insane as of late and since I tend to do most of my blogging at work during quieter moments it has not been working out lately. Twitter has been a good source of quick entertainment but no real time for blogging until right now so I’m taking 15 minutes and doing a grab bag post of recent happenings.

On the FF14 front I put crafting on ice while I leveled my archer/bard to get Quelling strikes. I have three levels to go now so I’m nearly done with that and after that I’ll probably head back to crafting until Heavensward hit or I could always take Bard to 50… who knows?

I had an urge to play Swtor last weekend. That urge lasted just long enough to get me through Ajunta Pall tomb. My inner dialogue during that experience was along the lines of “I could do this in FF14 and it would be better”. Also the cash shop all over the place is still annoying as hell.

Between FF sessions I’m playing lots of Bloodborne which I’m enjoying a lot. I’m trying to do the game as spoiler-less as I can and while there was a few slipups, overall I haven’t been spoiled too much. I managed defeat Rom the vacuous spider yesterday and now the game has gone into truly weird mode. Love it.

I’ll keep this short for now because I can see the end of this rare moment of quiet. Hope you all have a great week!

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Monday gaming updates

More gaming updates today because I can! First, following my last WoW post where I was wondering if I had any future with the game, Alas and Zel (well Zel did most of the explaining) both talked to me about some of the old gang looking to do some casual raiding together. Mostly drunken LFR or maybe some normal Flex mode but nothing more complicated. I can see the glorious rebirth of our EffingDrunk channel where we could bitch and moan about the awful puggies so maybe there’s something there. I’m curious to see how this will go.

I’ve also been playing some Wolfenstein 3D (the old one!) after going through the excellent Wolfenstein: The new Order. To my surprise the game is still surprisingly fun after all these years. There’s something very cathartic about these games, just shoot Nazis and don’t bother too much with realism or fancy story. It’s simple, to the point and highly entertaining.

On the FF14 front I’ve worked mostly on the Atma books during the weekend. Managed to finish the second book and made some good progress in the next one so I’m hopeful to get the third one down during the week. I tried some Ramuh EX with Duty Finder to learn the fight and this is a fight I’ll have to find a group for. There’s a lot of coordination required and I’m not sure a random DF group can do it unless I get real lucky. That still won’t stop me from trying but I’m not expecting much.

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Challenging yourself in MMOs

Back in October 2014 I started playing Word of Tanks again after a rather long break.  In the past I would play it by spurs of a few weeks and then leave it alone for a while and I figured this time I’d probably play until Warlords launched and not drop it again. But this time around the game seems to be sticking with me. I did play a lot less during WoD launch and the holidays but I’m finding myself playing a fair amount these past two weeks. I believe that this is mainly because back in October I had set for myself the goal of improving my play and this has kept me interested in the game more than trying to get new tanks.

Which leads me to today’s topic, wanting to improve your gameplay in videogames, something that I find is most relevant in competitive games and MMOs. For example, I’ve been trying to improve in WoW to keep up with my raiding guild which raids at a pretty high level. I’ve had to improve my healing in FF14 to get through Extreme Ifrit and Bahamut Turn 5. And now in WoT I’m trying to get in the  “bluenicum” range which equals roughly to the top 5% of players (blue is the color given by mods to the players in that range). There are also traces on this blog of my attempts at getting better at SC2.

Now these are all pretty high goals and I know that to enjoy these games I don’t need to raid at a high level, I don’t need to do extreme modes or be in a particular league or be a top tier player. For me though, it’s a matter of challenge and let’s be honest, pride. I play a ton of games and most of time I play on the harder settings. Games like the Soul series (Dark Souls, etc…) just appeal to me and I love playing them. Beating a hard game not only gives a great sense of accomplishment but most of the time I find them more interesting too. A lot of game mechanics are often not apparent on the lower difficulty settings and playing on a harder setting often allow you to appreciate all the depth a game has to offer.  In an MMO being able to play at a higher level often gives you access to more challenging content version of raids and boss fights which I find more interesting.

And let’s not forget pride. After playing games on harder setting for long I want to be able to keep doing so and when I find a game where I struggle it becomes a matter of pride to be able to “beat it”. In my mind, there’s no way I’m going to be beaten by mere lines of codes. I’ll figure out the solution and come out on top. When translated to MMOs or competitive games I know fully well that I’m not a pro player but I’m not satisfied if I can’t play at a high enough level. It might not be the best reason for wanting to improve but here it is.

Sadly I’m not always able to reach those goals especially when it comes to MMOs and games like World of Tanks.  Time commitment, opportunities and skills don’t always line up. When I tried to get better at Starcraft 2 I did manage to get in Platinum league which was my goal but by then it had become a source of stress and I’m not sure how much better I could have gotten even if I wanted to. Likewise, I can’t put in the time required by a lot of serious raiding guilds and even then, to improve to the required skill levels I’d probably have to put in way more time than is reasonable.

In the end though, I want to keep setting myself these kinds of goals. They keep games interesting which is doubly important for games likes MMOs who have no clear ending to them.

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About new guilds and space chili

So I’ll be playing Wildstar soon! A few more days… can’t wait. And I have to say I’m pretty happy that one of my biggest hurdles when it comes to new MMOs won’t be that bad this time.

I’m talking about finding a new guild.

One of the downside of being a long term MMO player who has gone through a number of guilds and play styles, from hardcore to casual, from simple member to guild and raid leader is that you’ve gone through the motions… multiple times. One of the things that annoy me the most now is that initial time in any guild, where you don’t know anyone and have to “prove” yourself, that you’re not an ass or a pervert or a noob or a whatever-else it is this guild doesn’t want.

Worst, since we have experience on what works and doesn’t work in a guild we tend to try to join well-established guilds or new guilds made by groups of experienced players that we know will try to keep the drama to a minimum. The issue though is that said groups want to keep the good thing going and are generally wary of newcomers. So we’re back to the age-old issue of “proving oneself”.

In the last year alone this has caused me to jump game twice. Both times it wasn’t really anyone fault that it didn’t work out in the sense that they didn’t know me and I didn’t really know them. Between gear grinds and having to prove to everyone you actually know what you’re doing it actually killed my interest in the game. I wasn’t playing a game anymore; it felt more like a never-ending job interview. I already have a job, it’s stressful enough as is and I don’t want to have to do interviews to play games.

But on the other side of the spectrum I’ve been in the raid leader shoes and you have to evaluate new people wanting in, whether they’re from outside the guild or a social member wanting to make the switch. The damage if you don’t can be pretty nasty. It’s even worse when it’s a social member because then you expose yourself to a whole slew of new problems and drama. There’s a whole discussion about social membership to be had in there for another time.

So… long detour to say that luckily with Wildstar that shouldn’t be too bad of a problem. The good folks at Chili and Cornbread will allow my rotten husk to hang around with them and I know a lot of these people from over the years all the way back to Eff the Ineffable. Plus there’s some Effers on the Dominion side so I’m covered.

By joining up at game start, I won’t have a gear difference to overcome and we’ll have time to get to know each other as we level. I really want to find that magic again we’ve had back with Eff the Ineffable and I’m hopeful I’ll find it with Chili and Cornbread. Big thanks to them during beta and we’ll be seeing each other in game.

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