I declared Thursday and Friday to be part of the weekend last week and decided to take myself four days off from the blog and one week off from the podcast. I feel super chill going into what is likely going to be an exceedingly stressful week so I think it was probably a good call. Apart of having to help my folks move some furniture yesterday, I mostly had a pretty chill thanksgiving. Both Friday and Saturday my wife and I attempted to avoid the world, and the only shopping we really did was online apart from a mad dash out to Target around 9 pm on Friday. At that point the store was largely sane and wasn’t that much different than a normal trip on any other night. Throughout all of this I have found myself forsaking my normal checking of Pokemon Go in favor of the relatively newly released Animal Crossing Pocket Camp. First off I have to admit I have never played an animal crossing game before so I didn’t have much of a cultural frame of reference going into this. The experience instead reminds me a lot of a mix between the former web based casual MMO Glitch and some flavors of Stardew Valley. Whatever you end up calling it the game is extremely charming and at this point I am level 16 and have a bunch of the animals at my campsite… enough that the last three or four gave me a messaging saying there was no room. Unfortunately I have no clue how you actually determine which ones are at your camp and which ones are not… but for the moment I am rolling with it.
I’ve also seemingly hit whatever the friend cap is because when I try and add anyone it says that combined between my friends list and the few outstanding requests I have run out of room. I have no clue what this cap actually is… I estimated 200 the other day but I am guessing in truth it is closer to 100. The game is maybe bad at messaging some things but I am largely limping along without doing much in the way of research. There is a quarry mini-game that requires you to get help from five of your friends, and I wish they messaged when my friends were needing help a little better. For example if you look at the middle section of the above screenshot you will see a shovel icon out to the side of Kelsey’s name. I wish there was a way to sort these to the top of the list because they are really the ones I am most interested in given I like helping other players, because you appear to get some sort of cut of their profits. After that you attempt to guess which rocks have the most profitable stones… gold nuggets seem to be the best. I still very much feel like I don’t fully grasp a lot of things… like how the hell to make large quantities of Bells that Animal Crossing currency. Right now I have a 30,000 bells loan with the auto place and have never really gotten close to paying it off. Thankfully they don’t seem to be sending anyone to break my kneecaps because of it though, and they still allowed me to customize my RV regardless of having the loan out. I feel like maybe they don’t have the best business model. Regardless if you have not been playing this you should probably check it out because it definitely seems to be addictive as hell given the wide variety of friends that seem to be playing it on a regular basis.
I made a bunch of progress in Destiny 2 but I am likely going to wait until tomorrow to talk about that. Instead I wanted to talk a bit about the other game I played over the break… World of Warcraft. I am still working on my tiny Orc Warrior that is getting less and less tiny as each week goes by. At this point I have completed the Cataclysm content and am on the airship just about to start the invasion of Pandaria. This is something I have never actually done on the horde side given my last several characters I leveled were abusing the shit out of the pre-legion launch invasions. I’ve also not spent much time playing through Warlords of Draenor as a Horde character, so that should be interesting as well. Similarly I have never seen Legion as the Horde… all things I am interested in experiencing first hand. The biggest shock for me is just how fast Cataclysm managed to go given that I started in on Vashj’ir Saturday night and dinged level 85 well before finishing the final section of it Sunday evening. I realize that zone is in theory about the same size as two other zones combined… but I did not expect to be getting quite that much experience from it. Granted I am fully geared out in level 100 heirlooms (minus the rings because I don’t have the patience for that nonsense), but did not partake of any of the experience boosting options. The mission of the day however is to try and figure out how to get a Pandaria flying book… because I do not want to return to land based leveling if I can help it.