Blog Archives
Unabated
My WoW playing continues unabated.
I have reached Exalted with Anglers and Klaxxi most recently, and the Tillers/Cloud Serpent weeks ago. I am a step away from Honored with Shado-pan, and stopped at Revered with Shieldwall and Golden Lotus (may whomever is responsible for Golden Lotus dailies burn forever). Since I am neutral with the August Celestials and they have nothing of interest for my paladin, I have not bothered doing any quests for them.
Of my 10 alts, the highest remains stagnant at level 88; dailies and/or LFR consumes all of the WoW time I permit among my other diversions. With me hitting so many reputation milestones though, this may change.
My (high) opinion of LFR has not changed, although I did have a few bad experiences. During the first fight of Vault of Mysteries, we had a AFK warlock leecher, who stood by the stairs during the encounter. While it was annoying knowing that he/she could possibly get rewarded for doing so, the greater issue was how the encounter was reset TWICE when he was targeted by one of the bosses’ abilities. The reason why it took two resets to kick the warlock was because it was not immediately obvious why the encounter reset.
The luck I experienced with my first run of LFR has not held up to repetition. Two weeks ago I received nothing, maybe 1-2 of those coins, and this past week I received naught but a tier helm. I will agree that the “failbags” do indeed start to feel worse than not winning rolls under the traditional model… although that is more a psychological artifact than reason to go back. I think it is easier to believe you pessimistically expect nothing to drop, when you are not immediately reminded that you had a discreet chance via the roll. The difference between Blackjack and slot machines goes much further than the mere odds.
For the second week in a row, I have also cleared out Black Temple solo. I am not entirely certain that every class can do it, but my Retribution paladin with 474 ilevel does not have much trouble with a full clear in 50 minutes. The 2nd phase of Reliquary of Souls is the only time things get truly dicey – Council also requires frequent Word of Glories while kiting – but beyond that it is fairly easy at this level and gear. I got the T6 pants and shoulders on my first run, and picked up some other Transmog-worthy pieces along the way.
Unfortunately, both the T6 chest and Bulwark drop off Illidan and he has yet to drop anything useful for the 3rd week running; clearing the place is easy, but 50 minutes is still 50 minutes. I could probably “cut my losses” and spend a ridiculous amount of honor for the Season 3 off-color chest (seriously, 1000 honor vs 175 honor for the S4 chest), as I grow increasingly weary about the odds that one of the legendary blades will drop. In many ways, getting one of those on the paladin, an item I could not even equip let alone Transmog (…yet), would almost be worse than never getting anything from Illidan.
Gaming psychology. Such a twisted thing.
LFR is a Better LFD
A few days after my friend ran me through some of the MoP heroics, he asked what I thought about them. To be honest, I did not think about them much at all. They are much easier than Cataclysm heroics, of course, which should be a reason to like them as much as I did the Wrath heroics; I am solidly in the “random pug content should be easy” category. At the same time… something felt off about them. It was not until I queued for LFR that I realized what it was.
LFR is everything that LFD strives to be. It is the final evolution of the LFD process, if you will.
Like many people, I was annoyed to find out that Blizzard backslid on reputation gains with MoP, removing the two-expansion precedent of running heroics with tabards. On one level, their argument makes sense: daily quest hubs are one guaranteed way to get people back out into the world. And while Blizzard has a long way to go with their stubborn “strangers are competition” design – Guild Wars 2 fixed it so thoroughly that anything less feels archaic – the daily quests became a quasi-guild event for my group for at least two weeks.
But there is a longer con going on here, and Blizzard is being a bit more clever than I thought. Put simply: Blizzard is intentionally marginalizing heroic dungeon content. The decreased difficulty is irrelevant compared to the fact that there isn’t really ever a reason to run heroics anymore. When tabards gave reputation, you always had a reason to run X number of dungeons far beyond the possibility of upgrades. When (BoP) Chaos Orbs only dropped from bosses, crafters had a reason to run dungeons. When Valor was only easily capped from heroics, you had a reason to run them every day (or at least 7x/week). None of those things are true or relevant anymore.
Raid Finder as a solution to the endgame problem is goddamn genius. The biggest problem with the raid scene in WoW was with how low participation has been; no matter how awesome raids like Ulduar are, it gets hard to justify the expense when less than 25% of your players see the first boss. Solution: LFR. No matter how much they bribe tanks to queue for heroics, I do not think I have seen a DPS queue less than 40 minutes long. Solution: LFR. Seriously, I had an 8 minute DPS queue for LFR the other day to possibly get gear 20 ilevels higher than heroics. Random jerks that you can’t kick harshing your vibes in heroics? Solution: LFR. People Need-whoring your drops? Solution: LFR. If there was ever a clearer indication that LFR is in and LFD is out, it would be how LFR has the new looting system and LFD is stuck with “mage won the healer trinket.” Once they start letting you win off-spec gear in LFR, there won’t be a reason to do anything else.
Oh, and how many new 5-mans are coming out in 5.2? Exactly.
So if you are wondering what I think about the Raid Finder system, I think it is fantastic. LFR is not perfect by any means, but it is probably the biggest improvement in WoW’s endgame structure since LFD. It provides practice for the “real” raids; it provides complexity in a somewhat more forgiving environment; it provides something more substantial than endless heroic runs; there are/will be enough of them to take up a good chunk of your playtime if you wish it; better loot with less grinding; and, finally, LFR offers an elegant solution to DPS over-representation.
I sometimes question the decisions they make over in Blizzard HQ, but whoever designed the integration of LFR into the game proper deserves a raise.
Raid Finder: Day One
I used the Raid Finder for the very first time on Monday night. It was an… instructive experience.
Dogpile.
One thing that I learned about myself is the fact that I felt compelled to seek out raid videos/strategies even for LFR difficulty. It is not (just) about insulating myself from group embarrassment, it is about mitigating that awful feeling of not knowing what I am doing. I hate that feeling. At first I believed the feeling to be unique to multiplayer games, as I certainly do not hit up GameFAQs or Wikis the moment I get to a boss fight in a single-player game. Indeed, wouldn’t that be cheating? Or, at least, cheating myself from the actual game.
But you know what? I hate that feeling even in single-player games. If I am dying to a boss repeatedly and have no idea why, or there does not seem to be any clues as to different strategies I could try, I most certainly hit up Wikis. I enjoy logic puzzles as much as (or more than) the next guy, but I must feel certain that logic is applicable to the situation. With videogames, that is not always a given: quests that you cannot turn in because you didn’t trip a programming “flag” by walking down a certain alleyway or whatever. There was a Borderlands 2 quest that I simply looked up on Youtube because I’ll be damned if I walk across every inch of a cell-shaded junkyard for an “X” mark after already spending 10 minutes looking it over. Playing “Where’s Waldo” can be entertaining, but not when you have to hold the book sideways and upside down before Waldo spawns… assuming you are even looking at the right page.
I digress.
Hey, it could happen to anyone!
Things got off to a nice start in LFR when the dog fight consisted of just tanking all three dogs in a cleave pile the entire time. The second boss seemed to have an inordinate amount of health, but he too dropped without doing much of note. I died twice to some insidious trash on the way to the troll boss; those bombs are simply stupid in a 25m setting, as I found it difficult to even see them among all the clashing colors and spell effects. Final boss dropped pretty quickly as well, although I almost died a few times towards the end once people stopped coming into the spirit world with me.
By the way, the queue for the 1st raid finder was 15 minutes for DPS. Might have been a “Monday before the reset” thing.
I joined a guild healer for the 2nd raid finder immediately afterwards, although the average wait time of 43 seconds was a bit off. Was killed by a combination of friendly fire and damage reflection during the first boss, but he otherwise went down quickly. I managed to avoid falling to my death during Elegon (thanks Icy-Veins!), but was killed by an add the 2nd tank never picked up; that will teach me to do something other than tunnel the boss. The third boss… made little sense. I spent a lot of time killing adds, as I could not quite understand what was up with the Devastating Combo thing other than I must have been doing it wrong. Eons later, the bosses died.
It is becoming somewhat of a running joke for my guildies since coming back on how much random loot I pull in. The prior week I got ~8 drops from my first 5 random dungeons, for example. This time around I got three epics from my first two LFR forays, all three of which came from the bonus rolls. I was not around for the Cata LFR days, but suffice it to say, I would not have likely came away with that much loot in a more traditional PuG.
Overall, LFR was a pleasant experience. While I can certainly empathize with the criticism of LFR – it was pretty ridiculously easy – I can definitely see the logic behind Blizzard’s moves here. Some raid is better than no raid, low-pop realms like Auchindoun-US wouldn’t support a robust raid PuG community, and to an extent even the “nothing ever drops!” LFR sentiment encourages organized guild raiding in a roundabout manner. Whether this remains satisfying in any sort of long-term manner remains to be seen, but honestly, it is better than the alternative of… what else, exactly? Running dungeons ad infinitum?
The First of Many?
Had my first Cross-Realm Zone fail on Tuesday night.
It was around 11:30pm when I was doing some last-minute AH shopping before logging off, that I saw the “LFM Sha” in Trade Chat. I whispered the guy and asked if he really thought he’d get enough people at this late an hour (on this dead realm of all places). He seemed reasonably confident, so I joined. Soon enough, I witnessed the source of his confidence: you can apparently form cross-realm raid groups to fight world bosses.
I was shocked. Yeah, I knew CRZ was a thing, and I knew you could group with cross-realm people. But raids on world bosses? I am not sure of the mechanics of the inviting process, whether he had friends log onto alts on other realms and advertise in Trade or whatever, but we had 40 people in less than ten minutes. It almost makes me wonder why Blizzard even bothers with world bosses under this paradigm – it felt just like an LFR system minus the automation.
Definitely configuring Grid next time.
The fight went fine, with the Sha dying just slightly faster than the raid wipe well in process. I died in the final moments and elected to not release just to be sure; TBC has a way of carving archaic rulesets into one’s permanent memory. I received the purple box, made an extra roll via Elder Charm, and received a thoroughly inadequate sum of gold. At this point, I released and started running back. “So and So is attempting to resurrect you.” Accepting the (Mass) Resurrection, I prepared to loot the quest item from the corpse… what the hell? The Sha has respawned?!
The Sha appeared to be alive and well, with nary a corpse to be seen. I imagine what happened was that those of us on Auchindoun had been pulled into someone else’s realm and defeated the Sha there. I am not sure whether the transition back to Auch was due to accepting the rez, or the person whose realm the Sha died on leaving the raid, or whatever else. Bottom line: no quest item, and no way to even determine where the raid boss’s body I just killed was located.
It’s been 24 hours since then, and the queue has moved 4 minutes.
My guild mate and I put in our tickets, but it remains to be seen whether CustServ will honor our requests. Well, not Joeses’ request, but perhaps mine. Regardless, I suppose the CRZ mechanic made the kill possible (and the chance at random loot) where it would not have happened otherwise. Of course, so would simply putting the world boss in a more formal LFR setting. All the CRZ seemed to do in this instance was introduce novel ways of getting screwed.
Entrenchment
I have been collecting some of the Ghostcrawler tweets in regards to MoP alt-unfriendliness and the overall Blizzard pivot away from alts and back to mains, e.g. entrenchment of old subs vs new ones.
Q: Is the plan in Mists to have raiders go through each raid and let the new ones pile up or use LFR to leapfrog tiers?
A: Want to err on the side of the former. If you want to do 5.2 raid, you can gear up in 5.0 LFR. (source)
Q: Upgradeable gear is okay for honor gear, but it shouldn’t be for Conquest, as it’ll take months to catch up. Thoughts?
A: Problem with catch up (PvE or PvP) is it encourages everyone to play less. We like playing more to feel like it’s worth it. (source)
Q. is there any point in forcing people to be revered with golden lotus to do shado pan dailies?
A. Didn’t want fresh 90s to have to do GL and K and AC and SP and go crazy, then finish in a month and have nothing to do. (source)
Q. Do you want people to be entertained or do you want people to grind? For many the two are mutually exclusive.
A. Big challenge to MMO dev: players say they want quality but may also unsubscribe if they don’t have enough quantity. (source)
Q: How do you feel about the players getting to 90 just now and not being able to play arena competitively due to being behind
A: We want to reward players who keep playing. Too often in the past catch up was so easy that it trivialized accomplishments. (source)
Q. But you brought this trivialization of content yourselves starting with patch 3.2 >.> … what have you learned since then?
A. We learned not to let players catch up so trivially that it negates everyone else’s accomplishments. (source)
Q. Greg, you need to stop blaming the wrong things for cataclysm failures. Catch up mechanics dont hurt the game
A. We just disagree on that. I understand you have very strong feelings about how things should work. (source)
Q. efficiency is more fun than non-efficiency. non-efficiency = time wasting = frustration.
A. I don’t buy it. Some of the most fun things in life are stupidly inefficient. I think being inefficient in an MMO is a social thing. (source)
A. We call it the Mechanar syndrome. Players didn’t farm Mechanar because it was our crowning achievement in dungeon design. (source)
Q: linear progression was the worst idea you ever could return to.. you leave behind lots of alt-players and returners.
A. We understand that. But the alternative is that other players feel their accomplishments have no meaning if rapid catch up exists. (source)
I am having a difficult time trying to comprehend at which station Ghostcrawler’s logic train got derailed. “Catch-up” mechanics do not invalidate accomplishments; new raiding tiers do. Nobody cares about your Tier N achievements when Tier N+1 comes out, because why would they? Progression and envy are ever-moving targets, so “catch-up” is irrelevant to those desiring one or the other (or both). So we are left with… who? The people disappointed that their hard, planned obsolescent work was rendered meaningless by the next patch but “oh wait, at least I can try the next tier right away so it was worth something“?
No, it just doesn’t fit. What fits is that in the very nervous design meeting that took place two years ago when Cata was hemorrhaging players, it was decided that every goddamn trick in the book to extend playing time was tossed up on the Mists whiteboard. Burning Crusade slideshows were dusted off and replayed. “Things for Player to Do at Cap” was underlined, twice. Removing catch-up mechanisms does, in fact, “generate” several additional raid playthroughs that would not have existed otherwise. But in that TBC playbook, Blizzard glossed over the postmortem section that warned “You can never go home again.”
Raids (etc) have shelf-lives independent of their necessity for linear progression; old raids become mentally reduced to roadblocks, just something you have to endure on your way to where you actually want to be, i.e. with everyone else. It’s tough being proud of accomplishments nearly everyone else achieved months ago, nevermind how the first boss of the next tier has drops that blows your endgame gear out of the water. And this is besides the fact that the longer the raid has aged, the smaller the pool of people willing/available to run it. Queues go up. Mistakes are less tolerated. It becomes a vicious, decaying spiral… which is precisely why the “Current Tier” model of Wrath and Cata was the better design.
I get that people are sad that raids like Ulduar become irrelevant in mere months. But that happens even in linear progression models! Ulduar ceases to be Ulduar when the people zoning in are just there to get a high enough ilevel to unlock ToC. The magic of these places is not wholly contained in the encounters themselves, but in the Time as well. Being there when the whole server was struggling to defeat the same bosses, congratulating each other on loot, and knowing that each gear drop was the best in the game (at that time). That was when Ulduar was Ulduar.
You can’t go home again.
So, yeah. I don’t buy it, Ghostcrawler. Even if the devs truly believe they are going back to linear progression out of deference to the high school quarterbacks of the moot accomplishment world, they are going about it in the wrong way. iLevel gating was a huge improvement over attunements precisely because it was more flexible. Removing or reducing the catch-up mechanisms is simply bringing back the Keys, complete with all its (alt-unfriendly) baggage. If Mists does not lose players over this – relegating the new player or recently returned to the back of the bus under mountains of required, outdated content – it will be because other areas of the game improved enough to compensate.
Into the Breach
It has technically been four days since I started playing WoW again.
Awakening at my favorite spot after 1.5+ years.
I say “technically” as the first two sessions were 1-2 hours long and essentially involved me downloading and configuring over a dozen addons because Blizzard’s UI options are atrocious. It has been more than a year since I last played, and I understand that a lot of my ire would not exist had I been playing continuously this whole time. But that is exactly my point. To someone just coming back into WoW from a long absence, the returning user experience is pretty bad. Not quite PlanetSide 2 starting experience bad, but close.
My first issue was with the UI scale. When I looked at my old WoW screenshots, it looks like I was running around in 1280×960 resolution, which was fine at the time. Now that I have a 24″ monitor that nags me for being in anything less than 1920×1080, within five minutes I started developing neck pain from having to look to the far corners of the screen to squint at quest text. My initial scan of the options left me with the impression that no scaling UI option existed, so I ended up spending most of Tuesday mucking around with the impenetrable MoveAnything addon and reconfiguring by hand. Eventually, I wised up and Googled my way to the UI Scale slider, but this was way after any rational person would have given up.
Something has gone terribly wrong.
After two days of screwing around, I did approximately six of the new Pandaria quests before I simply logged off. Unlike a lot of GW2 ex-pats, the clunkiness I experienced with, say, the combat had nothing to do with standing still and trading blows – it was with much simpler things. For example, I kept trying to press E to interact with NPCs or loot bodies. Nope, I have that key bound to Crusader Strike (or whatever primary attack I have for the class/spec I’m playing) because, you know, solely clicking on shit with the mouse never went out of style. And can a brother move a goddamn window please? Maybe I want my quest text a little more to the center of the screen. You never know how much you can miss simply moving shit around until it’s gone.
There were some things I appreciated though. When it came time to assign talent points, I did not feel the immediate need to look builds up on ElitistJerks. In fact, it was the first time in years where the entire talent selection process felt… pleasant. “Huh. I’ll probably use this one more than that one. Oh, this one looks fun… I’ll take it.” The glyph system felt similarly serine, although that was mainly because there did not appear to be any actual useful glyphs for Retribution.
Which reminds me: designers, stop being idiotic by ignoring opportunity costs. I can understand the rationale of changing the glyph system to be different than simply +5% DPS options; the Enchanting and Gemming system already has you well covered there. But why would you give people 20+ glyphs with upsides balanced with downsides for three limited slots? If you ask me to choose between X and Y, the downside to X is losing the chance to pick Y. If Y is so bad no one would ever choose it, yeah, maybe it looks like X has no downside… but that’s the designer’s fault for screwing up Y. As it stands, my paladin glyph choices were made based on which ones I could take that inconvenienced me the least. If I felt more comfortable having empty glyph slots, I would have left them that way.
Anyway, some other things I appreciated were the “What Has Changed” tab and the rotation guide thing. The spellbook being divided into spec-specific abilities was helpful, even though it baffles me why Retribution is so limited ability-wise. The Dungeon Journal interface is incredibly slick, and this was the first time I ever looked at it, believe it or not.
Whoever finally convinced the devs to do this deserves a raise.
When one of my (ex-former?) guildmates was showing off some of the new pets though, trying to bring out one of my own felt like opening one of those trick cans that shoot the snake and confetti out. “Oh, right, the Pet Battle thing.” It looked pretty overwhelming, to be honest, but I like the way it was set up graphically (I haven’t actually battled anything yet).
I am going to stick with WoW for now because playing games I don’t immediately like until I do (or until the cognitive dissonance kicks in) is my M.O. around here, but I just want to say: good lord, my first impression was bad. If there was ever a moment that I doubted WoW’s longevity was primarily due to social inertia, it has finally past today. It isn’t about the graphics or combat mechanics being old, it’s about downloading a bunch of 3rd-party tweaks just to make the game somewhat playable¹. Which is completely ridiculous if you think about it. If I were a normal person trying to come back again, I would have uninstalled within the first half hour.
But (un)luckily for you, I’m not, I didn’t, and god have mercy on my soul free time.
¹ “Playable” being a term relative to the other games one is playing, of course.
Bend It like Bachmann
WoW:
Update!
- Entry into the brawler’s guild is by invitation only. Invitations can be found on the black market auction house, by invitation from somebody within the guild, and occasionally as drops from certain Horde and Alliance NPCs.
GW2:
As we watch Guild Wars 2 mature in its Live environment, we have found that our most dedicated players were achieving their set of Exotic gear and hitting “the Legendary wall.” We designed the process of getting Legendary gear to be a long term goal, but players were ready to start on that path much sooner than we expected and were becoming frustrated with a lack of personal progression. Our desire is to create a game that is more inclusive for hardcore and casual players alike, but we don’t want to overlook the basic need for players to feel like they are progressing and growing even after hitting max level. Adding item progression is a delicate process normally undertaken in an expansion, but we feel it’s important to strive to satisfy the basic needs of our players sooner rather than later.
As the occasional¹ connoisseur of a nice bottle of Schadenfreude, I must admit: this week has been delicious.
While I kind of hoped that the Blizzard folks would have stuck to their guns with the Brawler’s Guild, the original plan always seemed more informed by the source material (“The first rule of Fight Club is…”) as opposed to good top-down game design. Creating “tight knit, underground” communities by throttling access makes the non-instanced, spectator-sport aspect feasible? Sounds like double-win efficient game design… on paper. But as we all know, things that feel good conceptually have a way of not working out in practice.
Speaking of that… whoo boy, ArenaNet.
I think my favorite part of this development is seeing all the mental gymnastics. This thread on Reddit, for example, tries to turn the question around and ask “what is a gear treadmill really?” Part of the OP’s reasoning is that the proposed new tier of gear will be easier to get than, say, in WoW, where you have to contend with random drops and competition between players over what gear does drop. So… if the treadmill is slow enough, it isn’t a treadmill at all!
Seriously, at one point the OP suggested:
O… k? All I see from that quote is that there will be more stuff later. That doesn’t make it a treadmill, just another flight of stairs, if you will.
Oh to be a psychic vampire capable of feeding off this boundless optimism/denial²; I would never go without.
To be honest, I think ArenaNet’s shift is both warranted and necessary. The cessation of reasonable progression is the natural Game Over screen for me, and you run off that cliff the moment you hit 80 and load up on inexpensive Exotics from the AH. This new tier of gear both reintroduces progression and gives players a reason to play the new content more than once.
Really, it is only bad news if you hold the ArenaNet devs up to some impossible standards like:
- “We didn’t want the endgame to be something you could only experience after a hundred hours of gameplay or after you reached some arbitrary number.” (source)
- “If you go into a dungeon in a traditional MMO and you, you hit a wall that you can’t pass and you need better gear, you have to go to a different dungeon and play and get that gear, whereas in Guild Wars if you encounter that, you could get better gear by going to World vs. World or expanding your crafting skills or several other ways,” said Millard. (source)
- “We don’t need to make mandatory gear treadmills, we make all of it optional, so those who find it fun to chase this prestigious gear can do so, but those who don’t are just as powerful and get to have fun too.” (source)
- “Because, like Guild Wars before it, GW2 doesn’t fall into the traps of traditional MMORPGs. It doesn’t suck your life away and force you onto a grinding treadmill; it doesn’t make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun; […]. It all gets back to our basic design philosophy. Our games aren’t about preparing to have fun, or about grinding for a future fun reward.” (source)
So everyone just relax. You’re going need your strength for this extra flight of stairs anyway.
¹ Shut up.
² Shut up.
Seen in the 5.1 Mists PTR Notes
I still occasionally browse Blue posts. I spied the following in the latest ones:
- Several classic Raid bosses now have a chance to drop new Battle Pets. The new pets can be obtained from bosses in Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Ahn’Qiraj, and Naxxramas. […]
- Raid groups are no longer necessary to enter pre-Mists of Pandara raid dungeons.
Of course, the game loses nothing had these old raids been removed.
*whistles*
In other news, I have no idea how to feel about this entire section:
Brawler’s Guild
- Underground fighting rings have sprung up in Stormwind and Orgrimmar that will give brawlers who have their mitts on an invitation a chance to earn bragging rights by testing their solo PvE mettle against some of the toughest creatures found in World of Warcraft.
- Players will prove their skill, and increase their rank with the Brawler’s Guild, as they win matches against some of the most difficult solo encounters in World of Warcraft.
- Entry into the brawler’s guild is by invitation only. Invitations can be found on the black market auction house or by invitation from somebody within the guild.
- As their Brawler’s Guild rank increases, players will unlock additional rewards and activities within the Brawler’s Guild.
- Brawlers on a realm will gather together into the blood spattered ring to watch as their peers face down their own opponents. They can watch the battles in progress to learn from hardened Brawler’s Guild veterans as they wait for their own turn to fight.
- If this is your first night at Brawler’s Guild, you have to fight.
Obviously, more details are needed. Will gear be normalized? How will this be balanced across all the classes? Can one dude just send out a bunch of invites or is it capped somehow? I will find it amusing if the bolded section actually makes it Live though. Reading it reminded me of those heady days of the internet when people were auctioning GMail invites on eBay for $200+. I can see it now: “WTS Brawler Guild invite 50k pst.”
In An Age 
Overboard
Dec 5
Posted by Azuriel
I am officially back in action, having successfully moved all my shit across town and (more importantly) getting the internet hooked up at the new place. During the transition, I took the opportunity to indulge in my baser whims, and ended up purchasing the Playstation 3, a very decent TV to play it on, and… games. All of the games.
In fact, I might have gone a bit overboard, even though all of them were less than $20 apiece.
Scratch that, I know I have gone overboard, because this also happened:
Well… I… but… MoP was $20 so I thought… sigh
The funny thing is that I have so much choice at the moment, that I have chosen not to play anything just yet. The only game I have booted up in the last 48 hours has been XCOM (it was $28 at GMG over the holiday), and that was just because it was one of the few Steam titles that I could play in Offline Mode. I only played XCOM until the end of the tutorial (difficulty Normal Ironman), but so far it has piqued my interest. Then again, I should also probably get back on the WoW train if for no other reason than to actually use the last few remaining free days. And then there is some PlanetSide 2 things I want to talk about. Nevermind the fact that I should probably finish hooking up my PS3 and pop at least one disc in the tray…
So, yeah. Overboard.
Since I am already in for a penny, might as well get all the pounds: if there is some PS3/console exclusive title that I should be on the lookout for come Xmas sale time, let me know in the comments. For example, I almost overlooked Bayonetta until I saw it on eBay last night.
Posted in Commentary
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Tags: All the Games, Bayonetta, Overboard, PlanetSide 2, PS3, Sales, Subscription, WoW, XCOM