Good Morning Friends! The market is flowing once again and I was finally able to clean out my inventory of debris and list it on the auction house this morning. Compared to the state things have been for the last day that feels amazing. I have a feeling that we still have a proper patch ahead of us at some point, because I believe the downtime last night was just to address the shut off of “wealth transfer systems”. Can we just talk about how weird of a term that is for money flowing through an economy? I mean I guess it makes sense but also isn’t exactly the phase that comes to mind immediately. However given that they eventually shut off player to player trading so not even barter was working… it legitimately was a way of freezing all transfer of any assets.
Last night was a pretty exciting evening because there were four different invasions happening and I signed up for them all. The only one I did not actually get to participate in was Everfall, because it overlapped with First Light. So the irony is I spent the entire night defending territory for people other than the Syndicate. Eliyon and Warenwolf however made it into the Everfall Invasion, and finally got to experience what it is like. I have quite a bit of fun doing these, and it seems as though we made it further in the First Light than I am used to because I got to see the giant skull blimps that folks had been talking about… or as most people refer to them “Terminators”. All told for the evening I managed to pull in 1890 gold for defending three territories.
I tend to go into battle with either Hammer and Great Axe or Hammer and Sword, and the role play is that of Tank but the definition of what tanks do is a little different. Generally speaking we think of Tanks as taunting the NPCs and this absolutely works on a few of the waves. However the real role that we play is to crowd control the incoming encounters so that the ranged dps and folks on cannons can whittle them down before the next wave spawns. That means as things are running in we are trying to time those stuns and gravity wells just right in order to trap everything into a murder ball. I figure this works pretty much the same in War as it does in Invasion, with the key difference there being that you need to stand on the point no matter what happens.
Invasions however are pretty much always a lost cause, and I am not sure exactly what needs to be done in order to juice the outcome. I do wonder if this is scaled in a way that they are expecting every player to have 3 corruption trophies, be using corruption coatings, and stacking as much anti-corruption gear as you can possible get. I mean I would like to think that we have stacked pretty great players during most of these events, and last night several folks were abusing the hatchet bug in order to turn in massive damage numbers… and still we died horribly. I do hope at some point on the horizon there is a tuning patch that actually makes these events winnable. However in the meantime I am going to keep signing up because they are a good source of gold if I get chosen. Thankfully I have apparently not made myself obnoxious enough to Green or Yellow and they are still willing to group up with me.
In other news, yesterday was the Blizzard earnings call and the news was not spectacular. They of course tried to polish the hell out of that turd, but essentially neither Diablo 4 or Overwatch 2 are going to be released in 2022. That means that at least over the course of the next year the only thing that can possibly launch is Diablo Immortal, which will be entering another test phase soon. I am not sure how I feel about this honestly because maybe just maybe by 2022 I will feel less shame towards the thought of playing Blizzard games, and be able to partake of Diablo 4 guilt free whenever it releases. It also means however that Blizzard is going to have to spread that butter way too thin over the course of the year to try and keep players engaged without new releases. I don’t think there is any way in hell we get a World of Warcraft expansion next year either.
This news has unsurprisingly not been taken well by investors. The irony is… profits are up which means that they are coasting on micro-transactions. Patch 9.1.5 just landed in World of Warcraft, but I am not sure it is accompanied by as much fanfare as they would have hoped. It is one gigantic fan service patch and ultimately good for the people still playing the game, but I am not sure how many account reactivations it is going to trigger, especially considering FFXIV Endwalker is now 16 days away. There are likely going to be some rough times ahead for Blizzard but I hope that they actually make good on all of the demands by A Better ABK and by this time next year we can actually feel good about supporting them once more.