Spending time and money

/ / Leave a Comment / Blaugust, SW:TOR

I really like the housing in SW:TOR – and that’s why I was kinda excited we’d get a new Stronghold, and on Rishi, my favorite piratey planet!
So today I put down the 3m Credits and bought one (you get the first expansion, The Overlook, for just 120k until the next patch, so grab it!). I was a little let down by the entrance layout, something I had missed when watching a test server video. Not sure how much I’ll use this for everyday, probably not so much 🙁 The “housing” part is just too far from the entrance, which sucks. But I also put down some money to expand my third Stronghold, Nar Shaddaa (this one *is* awesome) and I’m now at 75% bonus for Conquests.
This 100% EXP boost is pretty nice though, it catapulted me from Command Level 11x to 142 in just 2-3h, and I have half of a Conquest done already for this week with just 2x Tatooine dailies. Maybe I’ll try to do one more 2h session this week, but I’ll definitely do one after the next reset, where I hope to get another 20 command levels in 3h. I’m really not a fan of gear grinding at max level, and this Command Level thing is basically that. Better gear, and an arbitrary metric of an endgame Level, meh.
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my tenth post.

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My gaming history

/ / Leave a Comment / About this blog, Blaugust

This week is Get to Know Each Other Week at Blaugust, and I had this page draft I wanted to publish for a while, so I just did that. Because it’s nearly midnight, I got in some gaming time today, but overall got up too early, came home too late and so I’m posting a draft, still going strong with one post per day 🙂
This page called Gaming History (which I will not reproduce here) shows a list of games I played and that I either think worth mentioning at the time, or which just had such a big impact that I wanted to write down when I started playing them (not necessarily when I stoppped).
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my ninth post.

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Notable quotes

/ / Leave a Comment / Blaugust, WoW

Were there any quotes by guild mates or people on your server that became the stuff of legends or just quoted to no end? Some of them are probably in-jokes, but I have two I fondly remember even after many, many years.
The first one was about Illidari Council late in Black Temple.
WoWWiki says “[…] it sports a difficult pull and a rather chaotic battle for survival, which requires high situational awareness and fast reflexes from all raid members.” and thus someone called it
“The Super Bowl of… not standing in things.” and it’s the most apt and yet funny description I’ve ever heard about a raid boss.
The second one was spoken by our WoW guild leader at the time.
I can only paraphrase it, but it went something like:
I love all of you. But I also love the safe feeling that you’re all living hundreds of kilometers away.
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my eigth post.

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SWTOR – Weekly report & new patch

/ / Leave a Comment / Blaugust, SW:TOR

Before the Blaugust hype started I mostly posted updates on what I was playing, seems I didn’t do that for a week now.
Still had a few Command XP boosts and my eyes set on reaching Command Level 300 this year, so I worked on that for a while. For some reason I switch from easy relaxed playing to clenching my teeth and not even getting up for a drink when I have XP boosts running, bit of an unhealthy attitude. Anyway, the boost is 2h and in 70 minutes I managed to do Ziost, Section X, and Voss including the weeklies, which catapulted me from 97 to 108. Sadly I didn’t think it through properly and did those 3 again yesterday, so no Weekly – and I only got 2 Levels instead of the assumed (((108-97)/7)*5) =7.x 🙁 So this week I’m probably gonna check Black Hole and some other planets so I don’t make that mistake again.
My Imperial Agent hit 60 today and just finished the Legacy of Rakata Flashpoint, so that’s 10 levels missing here and 20 levels on my Sith Assassin for 8x Level 70 (hooray for arbitrary goals). That dungeon really sucks solo. War Chief Rehkta takes ages, Commander Rand takes even longer and the final boss fight also draws out. Bonus points for a buggy companion on Rand (no Heroic Moment) and in general the IA in my spec/gear is maybe good for burst, but not sustained damage.
In more positive news, I’m close to bringing another Profession to 600, although it’s only Investigation, which means logging in every 20 minutes and spending money, but well…
I still have my Level 65 boost and I’m still not sure what class to spend it on.
 
The 5.9.2 update Galactic Legend has gone live today, but either I’m missing some patch notes or the only interesting thing is the Rishi Stronghold that’s too expensive for me right now. I do have ~7m but I still need to buy some wings for my Nar Shaddaa Stronghold. So I’m a little unexcited about this content patch, but at least the servers were up and running when I got home from work. Apparently we have +100% XP though for a few days.
 
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my seventh post.

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A certain kind of completionism

/ / 6 Comments / Blaugust, SW:TOR / , ,

I have this thing where I want to have one of every class in MMOs I play. This is not too uncommon, but I usually also want to at least have one of every race, and sometimes one of every gender. Basic math says this usually does not work out well without having too many duplicates. And really, who needs 4 max-level rogues? 3 should be enough.
Anyway, I have this problem in SWTOR right now.
I’ve got all the classes at 50+, most at 70 – check.
I’ve got a healthy mix of male(3) and female(5) characters – check.
Now the races are more complicated:

  • Cyborg – female (but Human is really close)
  • Chiss – male
  • Human – male (but Cyborg is really close)
  • Sith Pureblood – female
  • Rattataki – female
  • Twi’lek – female
  • Miraluka – female (still pretty close to Human/Cyborg)
  • Zabrak (light/non-red) – female
  • Mirialan – male and female

So that means these races are completely missing:

  • Cathar
  • Togruta

And because SWTOR has one voice actor each per class and gender, for all the combos of advanced class (e.g. Jedi Knight & Guardian, where the voice actor is the same) I want to have the other gender. The only 2 classes where I already started the second playthrough on the other gender are Jedi Consular and Imperial Agent.
So this means I’m still missing these (yeah I said 5 female earlier, but it’s 7 including the lowbies):

  • Mercenary – male
  • Sith Marauder – female
  • Sith Sorcerer – male
  • Jedi Guardian – male
  • Gunslinger – male
  • Vanguard – male

I also already made one character model in the creator I really like, so the Sith Marauder is basically set to Cyborg, or more likely, Human and female.
Now where to put the male Cathar and Togruta? Clipping is an issue with the Twi’lek Lekku and as far as I’ve seen, also with the Togruta. So maybe not the Mercenary where I’m inclined to have a helmet on from time to time. Also not the Gunslinger, because that would just mirror my Twi’lek Smuggler.
Then there’s the point of having a non-standard class in one of the factions, so maybe a Rattataki Vanguard would be nice (once I have the Sniper at 50 to unlock the race for the legacy).
So maybe this will work out:

  • Sith Marauder – female Human
  • Sith Sorcerer – male Zabrak
  • Jedi Guardian – male Togruta
  • Gunslinger – male Cathar
  • Vanguard – male Rattataki (could be Cathar, but I don’t want a second Aric Jorgan, also Rattataki look more badass)
  • Mercenary – yeah, that’s the only one where I’m still at a total loss, could also be Twi’lek, or Sith Pureblood, or anything

Wouldn’t it be nice if you only had these problems in your life? 🙂 I have the same problem for WoW, but as I’m not actively playing right now I won’t go into detail here. Ragnarok Online was kinda nice where you only had cute humans in male and female and a few hair styles and colors to choose from…
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my sixth post.

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Topic Brainstorming Week: How do you buy games?

/ / 3 Comments / Blaugust, Games

Yay, I did find something for Blaugust Reborn’s “Topic Brainstorming Week” because it’s something I’d love to know if people are willing to talk about it.
How do you choose which games to get? Are you grabbing anything that comes out and looks interesting? At launch or at the first sale? Do you preorder? Do you buy Humble Bundles and then never play them? Do you gravitate towards or away from F2P titles? Or do you not care and decide case by case for these?
I think I’m not part of the majority of people who spend a decent chunk of their time playing games: I have just shy of 100 games on Steam, and as you can see in my yearly gaming expense reports I don’t buy many games, and when I buy one and only play it for a few hours I’m kinda let down. That’s why I’m usually debating with myself for months whether to get a game or not. Impulse buys aren’t really my thing.
Friends have told me I’m kinda tightfisted, but in reality I’d much rather gift a game for a few bucks to someone when I know they will play it than buy a cheaper one on sale for myself if I’m not sure I’ll play it. Or even worse, if I love the art style or something but know I will stop after a few hours. And no, I also don’t usually buy and try to evaluate it in 2 hours to return it…
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my fourth post.

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Random blast from the past

/ / 4 Comments / Blaugust, WoW / ,

Yesterday Jeromai posted something I didn’t know, that you can get a random blog post out of your WordPress blog by appending “?random” to the URL – of course I had to try it and see if it’s something interesting.
My lucky draw was: Mirror, mirror on the wall from March 2010, and there’s a reason I want to write about that post.
Basically when I wrote Ranking WoW’s races two weeks ago I was pretty sure I had a post about this exact topic and wanted to link it, but either I didn’t find it or, more likely, forgot at the end of my rambling post.
So yeah, my taste has stayed closer to 2010 than 2005, but also not completely. That’s why I blog, to remember what I was thinking about 8 or 13 years ago 😉
 
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my third post.

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Of dilemmas and other things

/ / 1 Comment / About this blog, Blaugust

Came in later for work today because I had to run some errands in the morning, took a longer lunch break and then stayed an hour longer to finish something. That’s why I got out only just before 20:00 and that’s when the shops close. I had originally planned to grab something on the way home, but I wasn’t too hungry anyway so I skipped dinner.
That’s not the dilemma though, it’s that there’s like 50 new blog posts to read because all the Blaugust participants are eagerly writing. Reading blog posts takes time. That means I don’t really have time to play games tonight I guess (did half an hour of Dead Cells and then gave up for the night again), and so I have nothing to write about. What a dilemma. #firstworldproblems
But this week is Topic Brainstorming Week and I guess that’s not my cup of tea anyway. I wouldn’t say I’m 100% not creative, but I’m usually reacting instead of acting when writing things. I’m good at correcting stuff (short things and longer things like theses), I’m not good at producing any kind of text that’s not stream-of-consciousness blogging or chiming in on a topic with an opinion. And boy do I have opinions about stuff 🙂
At least I managed to write a proper post for tomorrow already, because I won’t be home and so far I don’t want to break my streak.
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my second post.

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Game Developers / Dead Cells

/ / Leave a Comment / Blaugust, Games /

Some days ago I saw this article about Motion Twin on Gamasutra and wanted to talk about it.
Money quote(no pun intended:)

Dead Cells developer Motion Twin has been talking up its studio structure, which sees every single employee take home the same wage, irrespective of their position.

I’ve heard so many stories of bad pay and horrible hours about game studios which boils down to “exploit mostly young people who really want to work on games”. So even though I’m a software developer by trade I dodged this bullet once of starting at a games company (but it would’ve been a part-time job during university anyway) and I’m not keen on joining that industry now.
So while I don’t know and can only hope they don’t have to do 80 hour work weeks, I liked this and told myself to keep an eye on that studio. I wasn’t originally interested in Dead Cells, as I absolutely suck at Metroidvanias and am also not really good at platformers in general. Anyway, I watched the Dead Cells trailer and was kinda intrigued. Then I watched it again, because of the art style. Then I watched it again, because of the music. That was yesterday.
Today I bought Dead Cells and after a little cursing made it to the first boss once. I like this game.

Dead Cells

PS: Blaugust has started and this is my first post

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