Necro Post #N

Maybe one of these days I’ll restart posting and actually continue. Only time will tell if that is today. In the meantime, current state of the gaming. Actively played games over the last month or so.

WoW Classic

Plodding along with a Gnome Warlock. Currently at level 36. Sadly with no fellow guild members near my level its mostly solo stuff, hence the plodding. Diving into dungeons with PUG groups has felt like too much of a commitment.

GW2

Briefly logged in with my Mesmer when the most recent story chapter was released to make sure I got credit for it. More recently I boosted my Necromancer to 80 and started playing it a bit. Played through the whole recent story chapter which was quite fun. I need to do hero points on this character and get more mastery points in general so still plenty to do. There’s also three mastery mounts I don’t have access to yet so starting those grinds might be next.

POE

Finding reasonable fun in Blight with a summoner build. Regular zombies and exploding skellies (Infernal Legion). Slowly progressing through maps with no real objective.

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MMO Update

Played a bit more Skyforge this weekend. Slowly getting to grips with how the skill trees work and how to grind the right stuff for them. Annoyingly I missed getting into the reddit EU pantheon as they’re now only accepting more progressed characters from people who are maybe a little less casual than I am currently.

In Marvel Heroes I finally ticked off Chapter 1 completion and Chapter 2. That had been bugging me since they rejigged stuff a couple of patches back and it started showing be stuff un-done. First it took a while to work out exactly how to trigger those missed elements. Then when I did, once particular bit was bugger. Now it is (or at least was in my game) unbugged and I’ve ticked some more boxes. Still levelling at a reasonable pace and hit 42. I think I’ve opened up all the skills to be used for final build now.

My WoW experiment surprised me. Having re-subbed via gold last Sunday I reached Friday with just a small profit from the glyph business. However, the weekend saw the profit start to bloom and at the end of Sunday my earnings were looking good for being able to pay for subs from selling glyphs. We’ll see how that goes when I skip a weekend due to being away this coming one. Also, some friends re-subbed themselves so we grouped up with some new lowbies and did some questing and dungeons.

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Blaugust

Third day of Blaugust. Maybe I’d have managed something the first two, but it was a weekend, and I was slovenly. One of the reasons I didn’t even consider signing up officially but at least Blaugust might get me to post some more.

Coming up, should I find some of those mythical round tuits, a report on my week away gaming. In the meantime, the weekend.

I thought I’d give Skyforge a look. So far, it looks quite good. Of the three starting classes I’ve stuck with Paladin. I’ve set my talents up for tanking so far, though at this low level of prestige it doesn’t make much of a difference. I have reached the stage of potentially opening up other classes. So as soon as I work out how, and gather the requisite currency, I might try one out. I’ve already had a quick look at Monk in the in-game VR arena thing and it looked like it might be fun.

Saturday evening saw me playing Cities Skylines. It was one of the items on my Steam wishlist on sale over the weekend. I’d rate it half-hooked, as it kept me up until gone 2am but I’ve resisted going back to it so far. In no small part to wanting to leave it till Friday or Saturday to play when it doesn’t matter so much if I’m up all night!

Played a little more Marvel Heroes early on in the weekend. Before I’d got properly into Skyforge basically. Managed to tick off a few early story points on my main (Storm) that I’d been missing since the re-jig in a recent patch. I did get the dailies done on Saturday whilst Skyforge was downloading though.

And then, of course, I actually logged back into WoW for the first time in ages. I guess they’ve tweaked things a bit as this time I was able to buy game time from the character select. Last time I couldn’t as no single character had enough gold. So I’m going to see how much gold I can make (via glyph marketing) and how much time that takes and hence whether its a viable option for keeping subs going. If that doesn’t work then I don’t intend to re-sub for real money.

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Monday Report

Lets dive straight in this time. No need to mention this is my fourth solid week of reports. Oops, mentioned it. Go me!

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Monday Report

Week three. Keep the momentum going…

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Monday Report

Second week in a row. Go me!

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Monday Report

I’d like to try and post more regularly. So here goes what is hopefully the first of weekly reports on gaming activity.

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State of Play

Time for an update on current gaming.

Active games:

  • Rift
  • GW2
  • Diablo3

Active subscriptions:

  • Rift

I’m back to making good use of my Rift subscription. Currently nearing max level with my second character, a rogue. Its been a while since I’ve played my original max level character (warrior) but I might try and get back into it. I feel like I kind of want to sort out various faction notoriety grinds. Or I might just start properly levelling a cleric or mage.

I kind of got back into GW2. It really is the best looking game I’ve played by a long way. However, I still dislike the lack of control I feel whilst playing it. I’m slowly working on map completion (gone from <50% to 70%) and some vague thought of improving gear. Mostly though I’m enjoying doing the guild missions once a week with a guild I joined randomly from their map chat spam.

After the initial buzz of the D3 expansion wore off and I’d levelled and geared (a bit) some characters I stopped. But I dipped back in last weekend and had a look at my crusader. I still struggle to identify the clear path to upgrading and handling tougher difficulty. That said, T3 is fine. I also had a look at the PTR and the improvement to 2H weapons might help my monk a bit. Of course when the next big patch hits it’ll hopefully bring the season and I might see where I can go with that.

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State of Play

Its been a while. Unsurprisingly I’m still playing games. Less of some. More of others.

Active games:

  • Diablo 3
  • The Elder Scrolls Online

Active subscriptions:

  • The Elder Scrolls Online
  • Rift

Yes, I have a Rift subscription and I’m not actually playing it. Having come back to Rift, which I tried on initial release, I was really enjoying it. One max level character, and another character being levelled. As well as subbing (for a year) I also spent a chunk of real money so I could do stuff like get all the craft skills on my main. Then Diablo 3 patch happened with loot 2.0…

Next up … games I’m not playing any more.

 

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Legitimised Bullying – WoW’s PvP Realm Policy

So I thought I’d try something different. I’m going to do some commentary on the stuff that has popped up today in my news feeds. Specifically my WoW one, though I’ve some general MMO/gaming ones that pop up in there occasionally too.

First off is a blue post courtesy of MMO Champion Blue Tracker. Actually its not the blue post I’m interested in as that’s just a standard thread lock comment. Its the original post that I think could use a “well duh” response:

A level 90 Killing Lower levels who have an unfair advantage IS NOT I repeat IS NOT PvP. It’s just you making the game unfun for lower levels trying to quest and Harassment.

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/264511-gankers/

Sigh, Blizzard built this boat that way from release. I commented at the time, before I even got into the last couple of weeks of pre-release Beta, that Blizzard’s description of PvP servers was terrible. It effectively legitimises ganking and griefing exactly as this poor person points out. So, unfortunately, whilst it is harassing, it isn’t against the terms of use harassment. Here it is in its full glory:

PvP Realm Policies

Actions that would typically be considered “dishonorable” are considered legitimate PvP tactics and will not be addressed by our Game Master (GM) staff. Actions that fall into this category include, but are not limited to:

  • Corpse camping.
  • Tricking players into getting flagged for PvP (i.e. jumping in the middle of another player’s area effect spell).
  • Killing players well below your level.

https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/player-vs-player-server-policy

Check that second bullet point out! Pretty much the definition of griefing. I’m still just as boggled now as I was then as to why Blizzard decided to turn their PvP realms into a home for douche-baggery like this rather than promote meaningful consensual open world PvP. This policy basically legitimises people being dicks. The aggressor gets nothing out of corpse camping or low level steam rolling other than the perverse satisfaction of having kicked someone who can’t defend themselves. It really feels like they’ve said its okay to bully.

What were Blizzard intending with this policy? The only thing I can consider is that they couldn’t come up with some game mechanics to mitigate against these sort of actions, and knowing this also knew they weren’t going to police these sort of actions, and therefore put this policy up to prevent the swathes of people who would be raising harassment tickets otherwise. And to quickly and easily shut down the swathes of tickets from people who hadn’t read the policy.

Maybe this all sounds a bit care bear. Quite possibly. I’m not a fan of PvP much anyway, as I’m not a fan of dying quite that often. Whether I’m dying because I’m terrible, or whether dying lots is just a factor of PvP I don’t know. I suspect mostly the former. The things is, when I do PvP, I enjoy nice pitched battles between two closely matched factions. I don’t mind being ganked when its in a situation where had I been better geared, more aware, and a better player, it might otherwise have been a competitive fight. Sadly this is more like cadet camp being overrun by special forces, followed up with a couple of air strikes, just to make sure.

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