Endgame Viable

Since I’m done with Guild Wars 2 until November 28th (I got bored with dailies), I had a crazy idea a few weeks back to re-download and play Guild Wars 1 to have a look at the story. I’ve always heard it’s good. I own this game. So why not play it? I’m not entirely sure, but I think I own all of the available GW1 content. I originally bought it somewhere around 2011, and later I think I bought all of the expansions sometime after Guild Wars 2 came out when I saw there were some achievements and titles that you could get from linking your accounts or something. (585 words.)

In light of the announcement of World of Warcraft Classic, everybody’s abuzz with WoW nostalgia, so I thought it would be fun to re-post my very first thoughts about WoW Vanilla from 2006. From blizzard.com - I can’t find any screenshots prior to 2014. World of Warcraft October 10, 2006 Inspired by the recent episode of South Park, and being bored with FlatOut2, I finally installed my trial version of World of Warcraft yesterday, which I’d gotten with a video card about a year ago I think. I’ve been trying to stay away from MMORPGs because, as South Park indicated, you really can’t play them competitively unless you’re willing to join some kind of guild and give up your life, and really, what’s the point in playing a game if not to win? :) But I’ve heard repeatedly that WoW was particularly good for so-called “casual gamers” and people who liked solo adventuring, so I gave it a shot. (1565 words.)

I usually prefer to post nothing instead of a post about blogging*, but since Roger brought it up, and I just said two posts ago that there’s nothing to blog about, let’s talk about blogging! Rather than write something that stands on its own, I’m just going to respond to the parts of Roger’s post that jumped out at me, as if it were a Usenet post. The Nature of the Beast “I’ve written several pieces that I’m proud of. However, they never got the traffic I hoped for. That’s the nature of the beast, I guess” (1459 words.)

Literally my only screenshot from Marvel Heroes. I mentioned that there was nothing to blog about. Then I started catching up on all the things I’ve missed in the MMO landscape over the last month or so. CCP VR Layoffs. Apparently CCP decided they didn’t want to be a pioneer in VR after all. Presumably this means they’ll need to figure out how to increase revenue from EVE, a fourteen-year-old game that new players run screaming from. (Incidentally, I keep meaning to try out the free version.) (321 words.)

I’m in another “there is nothing to blog about”* mood so this is a brief update to tell you that I finished the GW2 Living World Season 2 again. It was more entertaining the second time. Except for every combat encounter, of course. But it felt considerably easier the second time through, and I only remember wanting to punch my monitor on two of the bosses. That’s an overall smaller monitor-punches-per-episode rate than Living World Season 3 was. (I used my Revenent character.) (237 words.)

Remember Checkhov’s gun here? I didn’t either. Still waiting for someone to use it. Guild Wars 2 posts do fairly well for some weird reason (but not as well as Dark Tower posts, go figure), so here’s another one. If you aren’t caught up with GW2 there might be some accidental spoilers below. I mentioned before that I’ve been re-playing the Living World Season 2. Eventually I’ll be uploading them to my YouTube channel, because hey, why not. “Pivot to video” and all that. I actually got six whole views on one of my Path of Fire videos! (679 words.)

From the media assets on the Battle for Azeroth web site. In general, I don’t think about WoW very much, but when Blizzcon comes around every year, Twitter explodes with chatter about this game. Even more than the moderate level of chatter that persists year-round. It continues to amaze me how many people seem to live completely inside a Blizzard bubble. (595 words.)

Not surprisingly, there was a Steam sale for Halloween, and one of the games that’s been on my wish list for a long time was really cheap: Necropolis. They apparently made some changes from the original launch version and now call it the “Brutal Edition.” I didn’t want to buy it, because even though it was only $4.49, I didn’t want to send the signal that it was “okay” to release an incomplete buggy game at launch and then fix it later. Still, it was supposed to be a “Souls-like” game, and it looked visually interesting, and I’ve heard some good things about it. (And some bad things.) And frankly, I was bored with other games. So for $4.49, surely I could get a little bit of enjoyment out of it. (883 words.)

As a bit of a data junkie, I’m nauseated to report that I forgot to re-install ManicTime after I had to reinstall Windows this month. Did I even mention that on the blog? Well, if I didn’t, my SSD failed earlier this month, so I had to reinstall. That means I am missing game-playing statistics from the period of roughly October 11th through October 28th, rendering my report for the month of October completely useless, and indeed any report I planned to do for the entire year of 2017. Ugh. If the data isn’t perfect it’s not even worth bothering! (143 words.)

[UPDATE: If you’re here to find out what the “Good vs. Evil Edition” actually is, as compared to the movie, I don’t know. I did not see the theatrical release. My best guess at this point is that the “Good vs. Evil Edition” includes a behind-the-scenes featurette after the movie, which I did not watch.] Mere moments ago, I finished watching The Dark Tower on FIOS-on-demand. This post will probably contain some spoilers for the movie and possibly even the books, but it’s not that bad, really. (900 words.)