Looking Back at 2012 Controversies

Kotaku's article on The Year in Controversy is excellent. Forgot about so many things.

The Creation Kit Consumes

Decided my first shareable attempt at a voiced follower is going to be based on the guy who does the Skyrim Mod Sanctuary videos, Gopher. Last month I discovered he's done many "Let's Play" videos that I found very entertaining. Ultimately they provided the motivation to get back into the CK so I could make a custom-voiced follower based on Deck16's teachings.

Last night I put the finishing touches on my first incarnation of Gopher. The voice files are pretty sparse but all of the standard vanilla follower functionality is there and voiced. I've added a few combat noises and other basics. So I'm happy with it as a proof-of-concept. Now I need more sounds. Lots more. Thankfully Gopher is rather prolific... part 3 of his newest series came out this morning, in fact.

My plans for this project will be both learning and tribute. I'm hoping there are other Gopher fans out there who will point me to samples that I can incorporate plus give me ideas for how to add the follower to the world. This in turn will help overcome my laziness and figure out the ins-and-outs of quests.

I'm also writing this to be as compatible with other mods as possible. For instance, UFO specifically states it's compatible with, "Any mod that does not modify DialogueFollower quest/script." Unfortunately this is exactly what Deck16 does in his tutorial. So I learned how to make my own quest and am writing a supplement to Deck16's work.

With the upswing in mod'ing I decided to create a different blog to house all my prattle and discovery. I've always kept notes and observations in one place. It's too difficult to keep track of my WordPad notes now. *lol* I might even have stuff other people might find helpful. Well maybe.

Gamers Are Bigoted, Petulant Children

Getting through some of the content that I've been missing. The Feedbackula - Sexism special was pretty exceptional. Some of the comments were incredibly backward but, ultimately, not too surprising. You'd think the Information Age would stem some of the stupidity tide.

Purchasing Dawnguard and Hearthfire for half-price during the Black Friday Steam sale has turned out to be the bad idea I knew it was. These foul creations are largely at fault for my lack of posting lately since my free time has been spent either in Azeroth or Skyrim. And now I've even got the Creation Kit opened again with plans to finally get a voiced follower written. *sigh*

Oh and hey! How come I didn't know about the F2P Marvel universe MMO possibly being released?

And what?! THQ just filed for bankruptcy!?! *head explodes*

That Was a Whole Month

Keep forgetting to get back here to write about some of my adventures. Had to laugh when I realized my last post was about trying the revamped F2P SW:TOR. I got another eMail about more Cartel Coins being thrown my way.

I still don't know what you can buy with them. The F2P details made my head swim so I wanted to just try it, get in there and see what it was like. Then I remembered I hadn't even finished the client download!

I had left it up for hours over-night but it wasn't able to finish. Couldn't afford the band-width during the day then I never went back to resume. *lol* Thinking that this is all a lost cause. Maybe it will finish today and I'll be able to log in tomorrow. See what the Christmas things are. Get annoyed at the F2P limitations. Then get my 30+gb of hard drive space when I uninstall it permanently...

That Bioware/Lucas Thing

So I got an eMail about the Cartel Coins I am due for being Digital Deluxe and having paid for however many months I did...

Not sure if 100 is a little or a lot since I haven't browsed what's in there. The folks at GamerBreakerTV found the shitty axe pretty humorous. Frankly I've rarely been tempted to spend money outside of box prices and monthly fees. Over the course of fourteen years of gaming I've spent an addition $10.

Anyway. Decided to see what their F2P model is like. Every description I've heard made it sound crippling and convoluted. I mean... only two hot bars available? Hilarious. I noticed the server list is a lot more brief:

Holy Shit!! *lol* That's the entire list of US server. Talk about a decline! Wonder how many other people will come back. Wonder how many will stay.

Such a massive client. Will give it some time on Thanksgiving but it it doesn't hold my interest, I'm going to get the 35gb of hard drive space back damn quick.

So Many Tanks, Not Enough Raids

Managed to get the DK into LFR on opening day. Unfortunately I did not have time to queue until the evening. Apparently there were many, many tanks and not many healers. Took almost three hours for the queue to finally pop. So, of course, I get one that already had the first boss killed. *sigh*

I was pretty anxious going in opening day. My hope was that only the hard-core people would be level 90 and have the gear score to get in. Thankfully it mostly worked that way as we face-rolled the two bosses and ate/ignored the salient mechanics. Like with Feng the stupid tank I was with kept him in the middle and didn't pick up a crystal. Then on Gara'jal no DPS went down into the Shadow Realm unless they were forced. Oh well.


Was able to get the first boss early afternoon on Friday and the Druid done Saturday morning (only an hour in queue!). Spent a few coins yet only got gold. The Druid did manage to pick up Netherrealm Shoulderpads while the DK got Bracers of Six Oxen. The rest of the bosses today. And looks like I'll be raiding 10-man with a different guild. More on that later.

Unsafe At Any Speed

Swift Flight Form is not as safe and OP as everyone claims. Sometimes you have to deploy the parachute...

Pretty Flower, Pretty Damn Rare

While none of my herbalists are max level I do get out to pick a few plants. I have harvested a total of zero Golden Lotus so far. If it weren't for planting Enigma Seeds I wouldn't have seen any since launch. At least I have the Terrible Turnip to keep me company...

A Little Extra Troll

Found a great way to troll when the Brain Food daily is up. Use Kaz'tik's Mind Control augmentation and run around with a Greatback Mushan pet. :)

Off to a Slow, Slow Start

The Monk is an interesting blend of abilities and after talking with a guildie last night I will want one at max level. While I am addicted to the Level Ding the thought of bringing up yet another character is not particularly exciting. I only find time to log mine in when my mind is numb from the daily quest rep grind.

Naturally I'll be leveling as Brewmaster, their tank spec. The concept of Stagger certainly sounds interesting as a means of mitigation. After some discussion and reading it seems their only weakness is magic damage. If their absorption and healing scales with Vengeance then that shouldn't be a problem unless it's consistent, spikey damage. I'm already in love with Monk mobility and ranged threat.

Brewmaster in PvP is fun. I can't really kill anything but with heirlooms it takes a while to kill me. And running the flag is pretty easy via Dizzying Haze spam. So long as I don't get stunned/rooted it's an amazing peel.

While I do intend to work some PvP in, possibly doing Mistweaver healing, when possible it seems a bit too slow for leveling. See how it goes...

LFR Opens Today... To Queue or to QQ

The Druid and the Death Knight are both at around iLevel 460 so I believe they will be able to queue for LFR. Not sure I will today. As a tank I have a lot more looking around and learning to do. And if I'm clueless, I'm sure 90% of the people that queue will be worse. I've been seeing DPS roll on healing items just to bump up their iLevel. *sigh*

Will try another round of manually q'ing for gear. Thankfully both have their weapons. The DK picked up a Goresoaked Headreaper last night. Not optimal but I kept losing the ones with Mastery to DPS. The Druid lucked out. All the pain of leveling Archaeology finally paid off as she managed to assemble a Spear of Xuen. Apparently it's pretty common as three other people in guild already have it. Pretty powerful weapon that will be great to hand down to a monk at level 85.

While Sco, GM of Method, claimed, "What's the easiest class/spec in the game? Guardian Druid" on his stream I would disagree. Sure, as a Warrior he has a lot of tricks available. And when he was able to face-roll heroics with a cast sequence macro it's understandable. Yet that's not how the druid works anymore. Savage Defense is completely revamped and requires active thought since it's for melee tanking while Frenzied Regeneration helps mitigate non-melee damage. The official forms and Tank Spot went over this pretty well.

Definitely enjoy both yet the tanking DK is still my favorite. Rage tanking mechanics are still pretty flakey compared to runic power generation. Rune Strike is also a guaranteed follow-up after a taunt. I do miss the mobility yet the DK's positioning is still wonderful with Death Grip and Gorefiend's Grasp along with dropping Death and Decay ranged. Admittedly tanking without a shield is still novel.

Speaking of novelty... going to level a Brewmaster monk. Dizzying Haze... seriously!?

Should Try to Get More of These Right Now

Was doing a couple of quests in Townlong Steppes to get Friendly with Shado-Pan when NPCScan rang it's bell: Lith'ik the Stalker was nearby! Had to fly around a bit to find him but eventually landed nearby. Managed to pull him without his friends... then died in seconds. *lol* Was completely unprepared for his abilities. Ended up dying three times until I could get a kite worked out. Eventually...

Whew! Unfortunately I hadn't read Lore's excellent guide on Panda rare mob loot. Went through all this trouble to have Plate Gloves drop that the Death Knight didn't need. Didn't even get a bag. Oh well. The annoyance of finding him did remind me to check on _NPCScan.Overlay. It hasn't been updated in forever but there was a fan update that I downloaded. We'll see.

I'd gotten spoiled by the ease of killing Sulik'shor. Managed to get both the Druid and Death Knight his Crystal of Insanity so I could branch out to stalk others... they're a capable team. It's also early enough in the expansion where there isn't too much competition. Yet that's not what these rares appear to be about. They seem to give items that are mostly helpful in leveling. What I'll probably do in the future is keep a 90 parked close by on the opposite account in case NPCScan pops up while questing.

Less Painful for Alts

With the ennui of daily questing quickly setting in, the thought of doing them for twelve different characters was extremely off-putting. Reputation is a major gating mechanism so there's really no way of avoiding them. Thankfully there's been enough grousing or something since Crithto announced this a few days ago:

Earning reputation with various factions has long been an important part to World of Warcraft and as time has gone on, we've made tweaks and changes to the system to make it more interesting and to give players access to unique items. For example, we recently hotfixed the game to apply a change to some reputation items which you can read about in our recently updated blog that allows players to purchase certain items much sooner. And we're not done!

Coming in a future patch, earning reputation is going to become much more fluid. Basically, once one of your characters has reached at least Revered reputation with a faction, all other characters on the same Battle.net account will then earn reputation with the same faction at twice the rate. Going one step further, and as an added bonus, your main character who reached Revered will also begin to earn double the reputation as he or she climbs to Exalted.

Here's a simplified break down:

• Any single character earns Revered reputation with a faction
• All other characters on the Battle.net account begin to earn double reputation for that one same faction
• The Revered character earns double reputation as he or she works toward Exalted
• ???
• Profit

We’ll keep you posted as this change is closer to being implemented. In the meantime, we’d love to hear your feedback!

This will seriously ease the pain though I won't know if it's enough until it's actually in-game and I'm working on a fourth or fifth alt. Going to add a comment myself.

Best to Troll By Doing

Noticed one comment about someone getting in after leaving the client going. Sure enough my character select came up eventually. Out of the goodness of my heart, I shared this information with the masses:

Fifteen Minute Restarts Mean Hours of No Connectivity

So the restart that happened about two-and-a-half hours ago has generated a troll-worthy issue. The servers did show as being back up yet very few people are able to connect. Did see one or two posts about people people getting in after leaving the client at Connecting.... for over forty minutes.

Mostly it's posts of tears. So naturally I added a number of my own trolling comments, such as:

While there's the usual outrage and demanding play-time credit or whatever, one interesting link came up over at WoWInsider. Apparently there's a Level 1 Priest able to one-shot PC and NPCs all over Stormwind and Orgrimar. The YouTube video is damn hilarious. And it looks like release, not a private server.

Ah well. There are  number of things I could be doing elsewhere but for now I'll continue to troll:

Heh.

Dirty Halfhill Community

One of the more OCD achievement-oriented guild members got done with Friends on the Farm yesterday. Just got my farm going so was a bit surprised then figured he's been farming (Ha!) Dark Soil for hours on end. Flitting about with the druid it really isn't hard to spot them if you turn Ground Clutter to Low in the graphics settings. This is the kind of thing to get done before the herd is done leveling.

Speaking of herd... I really hope Blizzard doesn't nerf the recource spawns. Granted there are always a ton of nodes up right now but I'm fairly certain that's because only 10-15% of the server is level 90. When that percentage goes up and they enable cross-server phasing the competition will be fierce. And with how everything end-game is Daily Quests ... insanity.

Anyway. For right now I will be turning in objects as follows:

Blue Feather: Old Hillpaw then Chee Chee
Jade Cat: Ella then Fish Fellreed
Lovely Apple: Jogu the Drunk then Sho
Marsh Lily: Gina Mudclaw then Farmer Fung
Ruby Shard: Haohan Mudclaw then Tina Mudclaw

While it's pretty silly I have to admit I'm enjoying the farm thing. According to Lore's video guide any character 86 or above can start farming, they just don't get faction. Will see about getting all the alts a level then the FPs. Will be able to pump out common vegetables in short order. Hopefully the higher faction seeds aren't soulbound.

Lore's video was a great introduction but for amazing, thorough information El's Anglin Tiller's Farming guide is the win.

Time To Work Out a UI

I'd been into interface add-ons since inception. Blizzard added huge amounts of longevity to WoW by having an XML-based interface with a scripting language behind it. Not only does it allow players to customize their experience but it gives Blizz a whole community of free developers to enhance their game.

Yet somewhere after Ulduar in Wrath I really gave up. It was so frustrating relying on certain "third-party tools" for healing to tanking when they caused errors or lag. So for the later part of Wrath and all through Cata I was very minimalist. Only Recount for analysis, TellMeWhen for reactives, and DBM for bosses. It made patch days a lot less awful.

With all the people I watch streaming now I've been feeling the pull back into customizing. A few days before MoP launch Lore did a Step-By-Step of his UI creation which sold me. I was already into about half of what he was doing. Now I'm going to work out the other half.

First Two 90s Done

Got a ninety leveled on both accounts now... what's next?! *lol* There is so much in this expansion it's going to take me a while to unravel everything. In my mind that means a failure on Blizzard's part. It was frustrating not to know where to train flying. Now with phasing it's difficult to know where and what needs to be done next. I don't mind losing the tabard + dungeon grinding. It certainly feels more engaging to have quests and factions to interact with. Yet there's no overall way of telling what's left to be done to engage those factions. Leveling lets you pick and choose where to go so some help would have been appreciated.

Thankfully there are external sites that address this need. For me it's all about WoWhead. Their Pre-Raid Gear Guide and Reputation Quick-Facts are priceless. The only problem there is where to begin! Need the various dailies unlocked but I want to optimize it. Neither the druid nor death knight have the required iLevel to do heroics so that will be my first priority. Thankfully Blizzard made a hotfix a few hours ago that makes the initial Justice Point gear available without having to have the Golden Lotus faction. Just need to figure out which pieces are weakest so I know what to pick up first.

I would like to get the Shaman and the Horde Warlock up to 90 now but I want to figure out how everything works first. Then I'll know where to quest and how long to instance. Been watching some guy named Archon and he seems to echo what I've heard elsewhere. Instance til 87 then start questing at the "right" place.

One thing I know for sure... it will be invaluable to have a Panda flying toon on both accounts. Since mining gives experience and skinning doesn't, the death knight hit 90 first. Train flying immediately then I was able to carry the druid around on the rocket. Makes questing a cinch!

Need Some Elevation

Was a little frustrated once level ninety arrived and I had no idea where to train Pandaran flying. The Stormwind trainer doesn't offer it so Google to the rescue. Found a WowInsider beta article with the short answer: Vale of Eternal Blossoms. Which begs the question... does the questline to open the Vale have to be done on EVERY character? *sigh*

That's Pretty Ripped

Whoa. Was watching Sco's stream and noticed the poster on the wall behind him. Wasn't sure how to ask who it was but someone else in chat did for me: Zyzz.

Some Scenario Insight

Finally pulled myself away from all the Borderlands 2 streams to get Theramore Tabard Farming going back in WoW. The long queue time hasn't been bothering me as I find other things to do. Each toon has needed some clearing up both in inventory and bank along with dropping lingering quests to fill up with dailies. 

When the priest got into the Scenario I quickly discovered that there's no Vote Kick. I'm sure all the griefers instantly realized and enjoy this as here was my first time grouping with one: Drovosek-Scarlet Crusade. He couldn't have been AFK as I believe there are no longer LUA means of accepting queues. But he just sat there. The entire time. Was hoping that since he didn't collect a banner at the end he wouldn't get credit but no dice. He bugged out after the boomkin and I did all the work. Fucking brilliant design Blizzard.

Naturally I wanted to take advantage of this griefer-friendly environment so I loaded up the second account. Here's where I made another discovery. This was the first time I queue'd for the scenario on that account and the queue popped instantly. I suppose that makes marketing sense. Give everyone ultra-priority if they don't have the achievement on the license yet. But this sneak plus the population cap they are enforcing makes the queue times insane.

I felt bad letting my hunter sit there at the docks until I tabbed back to my priest where that warrior was doing the same. Karmic balance. Another fun fact: after thirty minutes of queue time the display stops showing the god-awful estimate. Clever!

First Scenario Live, Yawn

Didn't see any official announcement so I was surprised when a guildie got the Theramore's Fall achievement. Opened up the Instance menu and sure enough it was active. Ended up being in the queue for a little more than twenty minutes. Not that big of a deal since I have to get quest logs full for release day.

 

The load screen looked all exciting. I haven't read any of the books so I wasn't sure exactly what was going to happen. But there was enough chatter on the beta and clues elsewhere that I knew Theramore took a big hit. After the load screen you go right to a video where Goblin_Caption_001 laughs about dropping some sort of bomb right on the steps of the central tower in Theramore. There was no back ground or story leading up. Just... bomb.

Then I'm in a group with another elemental shaman and a hunter. All of us are DPS--wonderful! No more reliance on the Tank/Heal/DPS triad. Which begs the question... what was the queue time for? Not waiting for the right combination obviously. It was probably some sort of server load balancing. Guess that's okay. There wasn't any lag or connectivity problems so I suppose that it nice. But it seemed like there should have been less of a wait.

It was all pretty simple though my shaman is one of my best geared toons. The other hunter and shaman didn't do too bad it seemed. Each class and spec has survival tools that should be taken and used. That is, if you're able to quest solo you would be able to do this scenario fine. I think I will try another with the Priest in heal mode. Will it be faster or slower?

Group composition aside there was very little story there. Had to kill some captains and clear off the docks. Jaina sends us to kill a seige engine right out of Isle of Conquest. Then you grab a few  banners then meet back up with Jaina. Kill a boss then done. You're led around by the nose via the tracker in the top right. That's it. No follow up video or extra sequences. Really no lead-in or introduction to the Mists of Pandaria.

Overall I have to say... meh. The Cata opening event wasn't terribly dramatic but it seemed more fun killing mini bosses and getting xmog gear. And it's no where near as fun and immersive as the Dark Portal opening. Blizzard probably wants to spend time on content that's going to last longer than a week or two. While I can understand that I'm still left with... meh. I was disappointed enough to complain on the scenario blog entry. Admittedly the tabard is something to keep around and I'll get it on all my 85s. But .. yeah.

France Wins So Off to Cards

Stephano really worked it. The commentators kept reminding everyone that he'd done forty hours of travel plus he didn't have his keyboard/mouse. After losing his upper final he did appear to be taking things more seriously when it came to final map selection. The never made it to Daybreak as he stomped through both Entombed Valley and Ohana. Both games were under twelve minutes iirc. Crazy. Less than two months until the Grand Finals come up in China!

So time for a little break from the Eurotrash. Legacy Round 5 of 9 begins shortly over at Star City Game's Open Series at the Stan Lee Comikaze Expo in LA.

Another EuroWCS Final Match

Well damn. Vortix came back from the lower bracket with wild aggression. He took out Stephano's queen hella early...

Stephano did try to rally by pushing some 'lings into Vortix's natural. Ended up not working out as it gave Vortix time to build up roaches.

So barely twelve minutes it's GG.

So now it's final final match time. They threw up a five minute break so it's time for more Gangnam style. *lol* Would be fun to be in Stockholm.

WCS European Final Match

DreamHack.tv really has done great with the event. On the last break they played Gangnam Style which started the N3rd party...

Glad they saved Tastosis for the final commentary. Neither of them get too crazy when shit starts hitting the various combat/build fans.  At the start they do the filler chatter but once in play they are interesting and/or precise. Kaelaris and Apollo are doing the after-game which is fine. Keep them on the couch. *snicker*


 

Almost eight-five thousand viewers. Incredible! The stream has never lagged for me both days. Of course I've been happy at 480p. Noticed that most people in the chat say 720 is doing well too.

The first game was all tense at fiften minutes in. Not even at twenty minutes when Stephano did a massive roach push in a three-pronged attack which completely knocked out Vortix's economy. That could have been Cloud Kingdom though. Daybreak is a bit bigger so it will likely go longer. Whatever. Pretty sure the second game belongs to the Frenchman. Or the main USA player as the trolls in chat would claim...

Really wish Lucifron would have taken his little brother out. Terran vs. Zerg is a lot more interesting imo.

Nothing to LFG in Four Days

I haven't had all five WoW accounts going in years. It was fun to do the bot swarm in pvp. Also enjoyed the challenge of macros and coordination to solo content. Thought about trying that again a few months ago when the end-of-xpac lull set in. Yet I've had other things to keep my spare time occupied so never got around to it.

On Thursday I decided activate one to do the Scroll of Resurrection thing. Figured I'd get an 85 going on the Horde server my friends from Dark Whispers are on. It got me a free Cata upgrade for the second account along with a mount for the primary account. Could also spend time in-game without being bothered by Battle.net friends. *snicker*

I'd heard the XP requirements for 80-85 had dropped and wow have they ever! Created a Goblin Shaman then used the SoR to pop him up to 80 with resto gear. The queue times were a little slow during the day but not bad overall. Thursday got to 83. Didn't have as much on Friday but still got half-way through 84. Saturday I hit 85 in short order then started the JP farm. Very little questing which surprised me. Queue times started balancing out at 85 so I switched over to DPS.

The AH had a few bargains so I got into the End Time series pretty quick. I wasn't able to gem and enchant everything correctly since the prices on certain things were insane. Even if I had the money I wouldn't spend 500g on the +15 Chest Enchant. Thankfully glyphs were mostly reasonable.

Today I hit the 372 gear score for LFR after five instances. Still had five 333s on: head, shoulders, waist, legs, and trinket. Took almost forty minutes to get into Siege of Wyrmrest Temple. I never broke 10th place but the group moved through it all fast. Since I was DPSing the only bit of loot I got was a healing trinket. *rolls eyes* Only took about fifteen minutes to get into Fall of Deathwing and Spine, as always, was dicey but the group pushed all the way through. So with 1 day, 10 hours played my Goblin experiment completed.

Starcraft WCS European Finals

Really enjoyed watching the World Championship Series the last few months--mostly because I won't pay to watch games on MLG. *snicker* I still don't play SC2 but it's been fun to watch. Currently watching Lucifron vs. Lowely. Hope Tasteless and Artosis are back for whomever Stephano faces from the lower bracket...

The chat is as trolly as ever... calling Lucifron "Harry Potter" because of his voice and glasses. Looking like he will move on to face his brother Vortix. And I'm betting he'll win only to get thrashed by Stephano again.

Stephano is just ridiculous. He always seems so calm during interviews or on cam. Crazy on the field.

Advanced Hacking or No Sleep

Been up a lot lately and admittedly need some sleep. But I got a legit looking eMail from Arena.Net saying my account eMail address had been changed yesterday. Tried logging in at their main site and sure enough got a name/password error.

Now strangely enough I was able to log in over at the GuildWars 2 site. Changed my password there without any errors coming up. But then tried to log into the forums and got this....

So yeah. There's some hacking or anger going on somewhere between NCSoft and GuildWars. Glad I'm not playing at the moment, heh! Would still like to know my account is safe...

Patch 5.0.4 Delay #1

Wasn't around when the server's were supposed to be back up. Now an hour-and-a-half later they're still down. Heh. Not surprised but I'm sure things are a-buzz at Blizzard HQ. With today being the official launch day of Guild Wars 2 Blizzard needs to have new and exciting things in the sub-based world available.

Decided it's time to do the annual clean sweep so I've cleared out the AddOns and WTF folders. It can be pretty painful to lose settings and preferences but I'm bad about not keeping all the detritus cleaned up. So far the only AddOns I've re-added are IceHUD and TidyPlates. Would like to get DBM going and a few others, but there's going to be a lot of fixes over the next few days. Will survive until things settle down.

It's going to take a long time to go through all the toons. I've been meaning to copy things over to beta forever but yeah. Pretty happy with the DK and Shaman but the rest should be interesting.

Speaking of interesting... wonder what's going on in Theramore now. Damn servers.

Need More Errors Since We're Close to Pandas

Just in time for a new expansion.... random errors!

 After last week's hacking I'm sure this kind of stuff is going to keep the Blizzard Marketing Team busy.

In the long run it probably won't matter too much. I'm sure there will be plenty of people that come back for a month or two regardless of glitches or bad press.

Blizzard Said Happy Birthday

For whatever reason when Tolos rolled a 97 on the Blazing Drake I smiled. Somehow I knew random destiny was going to step in...

Sure enough! Can't believe I finally got one. And when MoP hits all the characters on my main account will have it! *cheer*

It's Distracting When Game People Are Pretty

Watching the E3 Twitch stream. Splinter Cell Blacklist's creative director Maxime Béland is pretty damn hot. That accent, too!

Probably Should Just Buy It But Now I'll Play It First

Thanks to some quick tweeting I managed to get a beta key from GameSpot's Shaun McInnis. While I've seen plenty of reviews and hype I haven't been grabbed strongly enough to buy the game. I wanted to get in on a beta event to see what it was really like first. See what it is.

Going to Suck Waiting an Extra Thirty Days for This

So GameSpot just posted an article about Dawnguard:



Pretty impressive. It sounds like the Dawnguard are a faction of Vampire hunters. The video also shows off mounted combat, the glowy-eye effect, Vampire transformation, and some new areas. Hopefully it's a complete, separate worldspaces like Shivering Isles was.

As exciting as it was I had to laugh when I realized what I was doing. Watching the video I was looking for ways it would impact what I've been modding with. *lol* Such a nerd.

I do think it will be fun. In fine ES tradition I'm looking forward to feasting on others as a vampire then making a killer of these nocturnal fiends.

Wondering What Will Happen When Lots of Things Are Patched

So I guess the Lord of Terror is protesting the Monk nerf. If my time zone calculations are correct Diablo has been down almost thirteen hours now. Patch 1.0.2 must have been pretty intense or somewhere along the deployment line there were serious potholes. Glad I'm not on any of those teams.

Inferno Skeleton Kings Tells me GET MOAR DPS

Ugh. This was a bit of a bash-face-in-wall kill. Died five or six times 'til I found a spec that worked. Ended up using the Scoundrel along with the fire pet and it took almost ten minutes. *sigh* Need more gear. Yet I won't be able to farm much inferno for it. Not sure if Hell will give me upgrades. Can't afford upgrades in the auction house. So… yeah.

Civ5 was free this weekend so I put in a few hours. Erm. A few hours turned into ten. *lol* I used to be into the TBS games yet they seem a bit more tedious now. I miss the classics like MOO, MOM, and Empire Deluxe. Didn't quite need the time investment.

Still… there are times when I might load this up. Could be worth the $7.50. Or $12.0 for the GOTY. Got twenty hours to decide.