When I moved this blog off wordpress.com 8 months ago I was only 90% happy with my new theme, trying very hard to preserve the old basic look I’ve had since 2009. My CSS skills are a bit rusty and I really wasn’t in the mood to fiddle with everything endlessly, but I was getting less and less happy with something I couldn’t express 100%.
Something annoys me here
Inspired by Rakuno’s post I instantly noticed what was bugging me most, the author blurb/posted on/meta part.
The meta information about the post is in one line
So as I had a little time I went digging for a theme where I could do this better after spending half an hour fiddling with the CSS on the old theme and overwriting 20 rules. It was close, but not perfect and then I noticed 2-3 other things..
Yes, much better.
Long story short, now I have a new theme, Astra, and I only had to override one thing with CSS and the rest can be configured. Awesome. Let’s see if I stay happy with this evolution of the basic look.
An interesting topic I saw going round: How much to spend for games? Paeroka wrote about it, Naithin did, and Krikket started it.
I’ve been summing up my gaming expenses in the end of year posts since 2014, that post isn’t due for 2 months but the current state for me seems to be that I have allowed myself to pay 3 MMO subscriptions at the same time, maybe for the first time ever. I can justify that because I don’t think I bought any game this year, with the exception of FFXIV’s Shadowbringers expansion, if you want to count that. I resisted any sale and I’ve been busy enough to not be lured in by any new release of any games coming out this year. The only things on my current “I really want to play that” list is Horizon: Zero Dawn and Beat Saber (and I’m certainly not buying a PS4 or VR gear for those). Also the Switch sounds nice, but I suppose I should play all my XBox 360 games first before buying another console.
That average playtime figure is oddly high
Compared to the others I linked above my number of games is ridiculously low, and I still played only half of them, but I think I can also pull the bundle excuse – for example the complete idSoftware-Pack. I did play those games, before I bought the bundle, even have some of the CDs somewhere. And I have zero regrets for that purchase, as an example.
Does anyone I know have a lower value here? 😛
So the final tally is still out and I’m too lazy to do the math now, but I guess I’ll come up with the same ballpark as every year, roughly 30 EUR per month for games, which is 1 EUR per day – quite cheap for a hobby that takes up a major part of my spare time.
And yes, overall I feel quite bad to always just buy games on sale and only support MMOs that seem to do well anyway, but I don’t really see why I should hand out money for games I’m simply not really interested in playing. Sometimes I get the urge, but nothing but MMOs seems to really stick in the last years. There simply wasn’t a major release that has me pumped and excited in a way where I could reasonably guess I’d even spend 20 hours on a full price game for 60 EUR. Maybe Cyberpunk 2077 is the first one in years. Maybe.
And in conclusion, maybe I should look up my /played times of various MMOs, that would certainly justify being subscribed there. Marvel Heroes said just shy of 65 days, that’s 1554 hours.
10 years ago I posted for the first time on this blog (back at the URL it had for 9.5 years).
I was still studying (but already working part-time) and in my spare time I was mostly playing WoW (in that years-long stretch where I didn’t play a lot of other games, sometimes none at all). Wrath of the Lich King was the current expansion and I was raiding. The Crusader’s Coliseum and Onyxia’s Lair had been released in the months before and Icecrown Citadel would hit live 2 months later. I posted about my latest Level 80 char (a shaman) that would go on to be the only toon that ever would see me healing heroic raid content.
I would stop blogging after 6 months for a 3 year hiatus. I’m not sure why, maybe because working full time changed something. I’m pretty sure I didn’t play and raid less. Then the blog would go on with a post every 1 or 2 weeks on average (with a few bursts of activity) from 2014 to 2018, when I cranked up the posts just before Blaugust and apparently I was more active since then – averaging more than one post per week. Not very prolific, but I’m not trying to build an audience here. Thanks to all of you who did and do read from time to time.
When I started this blog 9.5 years ago I didn’t know yet if I would stick to it. Time and again I debated whether a domain made sense or not. Now I decided it’s time to do the jump and not wait until the 10 years are full, so here it is. Battle Stance, formerly known as Armagon Live. The content won’t change, the history is fully imported, just the URL is different. I guess I’ll have to tweak some of the CSS because I’m not yet 100% happy with the theme. Happy reading.
As is customary I am writing a “year in review” post that shows my exploits and ignores the rest of the world, there are better writers for this kind of stuff 🙂
What I played a lot:
WoW: 1x 35 EUR for Battle for Azeroth, no subscription yet
Oh my, just checked the Blizzard store. It’s on sale *again* for 25 EUR. Stupid me for buying it, but I really had planned to play around this time. Is it selling so badly they need to have it on sale twice in the first few months? Wow.
Games on Steam: 24 EUR for Quake Champions, 0.42 EUR to complete 2 Card sets
Games on GOG: 3.90 EUR for Torchlight 2
Games on Humble Bundle: 20 EUR for Dead Cells, 1 EUR for Shadow of Mordor
This means: 176 EUR in 2018, at ~15 EUR per month. WTF, this is a new low I guess.
Amount of MMO subscription months paid: 7
Bought stuff in the ingame shop: SWTOR, but with no additional cash
Full price games: 2 (Quake Champions, Dead Cells)
MMO Expansions: 1 (WoW: Battle for Azeroth)
So (and this is new this year) some analysis:
I’m still mostly playing one MMO at a time
Although I have 4 mobile games up there, this was only a few minutes at home this year, mostly while waiting for something
Depending on how much public transport commute I have, I play some mobile games. Usually I read RSS feeds, this winter I preferred gaming
I guess I didn’t buy so many games that I won’t play then. Yay.
There are still a few Steam games on sale I’m thinking about 😛
Did I already rant how I hate December and all the stress about Christmas? Probably not here (at least this year) but it’s real. I stopped playing Destiny 2, I still haven’t resubbed to WoW.
Torchlight 2 was on sale the last days, so I finally bought it after some nudging. It’s fun, although I didn’t play a lot yet. The only game I was playing a little was SWTOR – but I’ll have a separate post for that, maybe sooner. At least now the real part of my vacation time starts, all the Christmas stuff is over now.
I accidentally posted twice yesterday, that second post was supposed to be for today after a quick edit of “I finished the Conquest target on 3 chars and made ~50k points”. But yeah.
Haven’t done much yesterday and today, but I did start KotFE on my Agent and if you spacebar hard enough you can get Chapter 9 done pretty fast. This chapter is important for 2 reasons: Unlocking “To Find a Findsman” to get Alliance Alerts, and to be able to start the Star Fortresses story arc.
As I read lately that the ads on wordpress.com seem to be getting worse and overall because I’m feeling like it, I’ve been researching domain names and hosting options – if I should move off here. So far it’s been pretty good, but maybe I don’t want to scare off all my 5-10 readers with too many ads. 😛 I don’t want to spend too much money and I want a domain with whois privacy. The latter already soured me on that awesome domain name I was already about to buy. I’m not so good with catchy names, so I guess I’ll ponder a bit more about this. I’m pretty sure we had this topic as a writing prompt in Blaugust this year and I’m not happy with my choice (name of the author in the domain name) right now, although I was for years and maybe it will come again 🙂 Also at Blaugust I didn’t think this through renaming most of my accounts to Nogamara and just keeping the blog name and the twitter handle. Poor people had to write Nogamara/Armagon all the time…
And yes, I know about the wordpress.com plans, but I’d either have to get the 4 EUR/month plan and pay for the domain from year 2 on, so that would be like 110 EUR for 2 years, or just get an external domain which would probably cost ~28 EUR per year (~15 EUR for the domain, 13 EUR to map it here) but not even remove the ads, so no big win. Self-hosting is some work, but I guess I can pull it off for ~25 EUR per year.
Enough rambling, off to bed now and trying to get up early tomorrow to be home sooner and be able to run some errands quickly so I can be online after maintenance and get my Juggernaut to Command 300!
Is that even a word? Last year I managed to remember the 8th birthday of the blog on the 18th of October, now it’s a month late. Bah, who cares. I managed to write around 73 posts in that year (until the 18th, that is) – but with 31 in August and 29 in the 2 weeks before and after that’s only 12 posts for the remaining 10 months. As far as I can see I didn’t do any of these posts before last year.
Last year I had just restarted SW:TOR (and played for like 2-3 months) and also had played a lot of Guild Wars 2 just before.
2 years ago I was back in WoW, having fun in Legion – this was an extended stint in the Alliance, after having abandoned WoW in early 2014 and only returning for 2 months for WoD a month after it launched iirc.
3 years ago I was back in Ragnarok Online, my first MMO ever. But this was on another server, the first two ones I had played on had been closed down years ago. It’s a long tale of franchises and other things.
4 years ago I apparently wrote about mobile games, and my view hasn’t changed much, but maybe another post is due, having written about mobile games three times in total. I had stopped playing WoW in spring (after a fun visit to another server) and when WildStar launched I was fully on board.
5 years ago I was playing WoW and not much else. That’s also the year where I came back after a 3 year hiatus, not having managed to keep a full year running, only from October 2009 to March 2010 (20 posts in total). Since July 2013 I didn’t have any breaks longer than 3 months, which isn’t too bad. So maybe July 26th, 2013 should be the date to celebrate, but to be fair I did some games blogging in Dec 2011/Jan 2012 [1, 2, 3] – just not here. But these 3 years can be summed up quite nicely by: I finished university, I started working full time, I played a lot of WoW. I also wasn’t not blogging (~25 posts on other blogs in that time), just not about games.
As I wrote in my last post I took some Game Boy games on my work trip, but -oh surprise- I neither had a lot of spare time nor was I in the mood to play. Just a bit of idle surfing around before going to bed filled my time quite well – I didn’t even have time to read a lot of feeds. Also the lighting in the hotel room was really bad, so probably the GBA wouldn’t have worked as well anyway. Let’s see if I manage to log in to SWTOR tonight, otherwise I’m looking forward to the weekend, my posting streak is broken anyway, but it was fun while it lasted.
So, today is day 59 of daily posting and tomorrow’s might be the last one for a while, as I’m leaving for a 2 week trip tomorrow where I don’t know if time, energy and wifi will be readily available. No high hopes, but we’ll see.
This time I only prepared one post for tomorrow and only because at least it makes it 60 days, damn those love of round numbers, it was actually planned for today 😛
Just had an oddity in Conquests. I wrote I finished twice on my BH this week, but maybe I was wrong and only planned to do it. I looked at the counter today and it sat at 27.xxx of 30.000. So I quickly hopped over to Yavin 4 to do some RAMPAGE. Apparently I had done the dailies on a non-conquest character (getting complicated yet?) so my counter for Rampage III was at 94/150. So I killed a few mobs and it showed me the popup for Rampage I (yes, I, not II, sadly was too confused to screenshot) and at some point I got the popup for Rampage II, but the chat said +300 CXP which again matches Rampage III. I also didn’t get the Conquest rewards again, but apparently I just failed to read swtorista’s guide correctly. It says “You can complete your personal goal on as many characters as you want!” and not “as many times as you want”. Ah well, it’s not as if I went out of my way to get to 30.000 instead of 15.000, wouldn’t even say “bummer”. * shrug* I blame the multitude of days with strong headache in the last two weeks, no wonder you make these mistakes if you can’t really concentrate.
