It is not a great morning. I am suffering from what I sometimes refer to as “intestinal panic” and have been since last night. As a result I am little out of it and also did not get amazing sleep which has caused me to stare blankly into the void several times this morning instead of writing a post. Yesterday I found out that a round of mass banning went out in TemTem and for whatever reason I always get paranoid when something like that happens. To the best of my knowledge I have not done anything to warrant a ban, but given that there is usually no recourse it always makes me more than a little paranoid. This time around specifically because the company seems to think that maybe they accidentally banned a few people. Thankfully however I was able to log in just fine and thankfully this time around Crema is accepting appeals. However posts like this one will always serve to make me extra paranoid about random bans.
I continue to push forward in The Technomancer and while I thought I was getting close to the end… I realize that I have yet to finish chapter three of the game because I don’t have that achievement, and that there is also apparently a chapter four achievement. I may just not be able to tell at all where I am in the pacing unless the final chapter is super short. Last night I mostly spent my time working on a plan to disgrace my arch nemesis, which to be honest… I still don’t quite understand why he is chasing me in the manner that he is. That is a finer point that I have yet to figure out, and I am hoping that eventually as I wind my way further down this rabbit hole that it is explained. I am apparently the chosen one without actually having explained why anything about me makes me the chosen one.
There are two things that this game needs badly. The first is a way to skip time without having to find a bed, because unlike the Fallout/Elder Scrolls games beds are in fairly short supply in this world. The second thing is some sort of a fast travel system because I have retread the same steps to the point of madness. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but Spiders made the design decision that encounters would respawn frequently, which means each time that I trek through the slums I have to fight the same guards and the same gates over and over. The game suffers from a significant amount of backtracking because new quests will send you to the same destinations you have been to hundreds of times, and will again force you to fight the same encounters. This is definitely something they seem to have learned from this game because Greedfall had a perfectly adequate fast travel system.
In Josie news, she has entered the phase where she is into everything. She has explored her environment enough to be comfortable with going places she shouldn’t go now. I woke up this morning and she had knocked a ton of stuff off the top of one of the dressers because of course she did. We are reaching a point of equilibrium with the cats, or at least Mollie is starting to settle down. She has always been our high strung baby, and as I said yesterday over twitter she has now adopted the upstairs cat toy and Josie has adopted the downstairs one. Last night was the first time since Josie coming home with us that Mollie snuggled properly, which I am hoping is a good sign. In fact for most of the night I had Kenzie snuggling on the blanket draping my legs, Mollie laying over my mouse arm and Josie sprawled out behind my head on the top of the sectional. This absolutely seems like progress.
Yeah, I hate it when there’s not adequate fast-travelling in big open world games. In NieR: Automata, for instance, it’s been only introduced after a big portion of the game (around the time I got sick of walking/riding everywhere) and in Skyrim I only found out about the carriage or the fast-travel after somebody told me (iRL not in-game). Oof.
Backtracking is annoying, which is why I probably won’t be playing more NieR: Automata for now.
As for the TemTem-ban-wave: I hate when that happens. “We won’t review any appeals” – well, that’s 30 bucks down the drain when you didn’t cheat. If you cheated, than that’s your own fault. Now, I don’t know what exactly counts as cheating. Third-Party-Programs like different overlays and stuff like OBS can sometimes trigger those detectors and get you banned, so I’m not sure how to feel about this.
And as for exploits: Just fix the exploits, don’t ban people for making us of game-mechanics. Imagine speedrunning the game and then getting banned for abusing the devs’ flawed work. Jeez.
And then there’s Josie: I love her. Thanks for posting more about her :3 I’m glad that she found her place in the house now 😀
They now take requests for reviewing a ban. They rectified it yesterday.