A while ago (I’m pretty sure it was in March) there was a sale on Guild Wars 2, it always sounded kind of nice, WildStar was just not cutting it at the time – and so I bought GW2 for around 10-12 EUR. I’ve since levelled one character to 80, reached 500 in one crafting skill, levelled some alts to 30, 20, and 10 and in general had quite some fun and unlike in other games I not once felt pushed to buy something on the Gem store (aka with real money). Then a while later I learned about the upcoming expansion: Heart of Thorns. I didn’t (and still don’t) exactly know what it was going to bring (expansions in WoW have been a mixed bag, and so far I’ve been there for all of them…), but I was pretty sure I’d get it.
So recently the preorder page went up and there were the 3 options: Standard, Deluxe and Ultimate. I thought about it for a little while, then decided the Standard one was a bit plain. The Deluxe looked about right from the contents (but seemed a bit pricy) but in the end I opted for the Ultimate – I’ll get some of the Gem currency I haven’t *needed* so far, but I was looking forward to a few nice things.
Most of Reddit will probably disagree and tell me how horrible I am, taking up what Arenanet puts up as an offer. But still, I don’t see this more as thanking them for my past enjoyment of the game in the last 3 months (for a laughable price of less than a month’s subscription in other games) and trusting them to not fuck this up in the near future and not so much blindly accepting what they give us. I know this can send mixed signals and maybe just buying some currency for the store would’ve sent less mixed signals – but the opportunity was at the right time, for the right price.
 
In other news, I recently bought a few things off GoG and Steam, namely Borderlands 2 (which is pretty good, and I like it a lot better than Borderlands) with all the DLC for 10 EUR, The Witcher 1+2 (was cheap and I’m interested – but I don’t have high enough hopes to stick longer than a few hours, that’s why Witcher 3 was out), Mass Effect 1+2 (read so many good things, can’t wait) for ~7 EUR and Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag for 8 EUR – because the start of Brotherhood wasn’t especially good (after the phenomal AC 2) and when I get back, I might as well play the part that’s widely said to be the best part.
Totally unrelated, but apparently I hate having games on Steam that I had already owned before. It shows “Played: 0 hours” when in fact I spent days, weeks or even months playing them. But it doesn’t annoy me half as much as WoW not retroactively having given me basically all WSG, AB and AV achievements when they were introduced. One does not simply reach rank 11 without a five base win or 2000:1990 or whatever it was. Back then I was very much tempted to open tickets and link to screenshots of my past exploits.