Month: December 2022

Games Played 2022 Edition

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The Grand Experiment – Tracking Games Played Since 2012

Well my friends it is time once again for me to drag out the spreadsheet porn and share with you my gaming habits from the last year. Since this post is likely going to see some fresh eyeballs who have never experienced this level of nonsense before let me give you a high level of this project. One of the cool things about daily blogging is that it gives me a pretty solid record of what I was doing at any given point since April of 2013 when I embarked upon my first daily blogging journey. I also take fairly meticulous care of saving my screenshots and have a collection sorted by game and genre that makes up well over 50,000 individual files and takes up around 140 GB. This has allowed me to more or less reconstruct my playing habits back to 2012.

For years I used a service called Raptr, but when it died I lost something that I considered to be a relatively valuable resource. I knew that trying to keep track of hours played was a fool’s errand and for Steam games that interface did a relatively good job of that. Instead what I wanted to track was whether or not I played a game in a given month. This was a simple data point that allowed me to view how my tastes in gaming shifted over time. The pattern that emerges is that I have a dozen or so “forever games” that I shift back and forth between, and a number of games that I visit for a month or two. Since starting this nonsense I have logged 374 different games that I have spent time playing and of those 236 have only been played for a single month.

Exploring Games PLayed in 2022

Games Played Longer than 3 Months in 2022

This was very much a year of forever games for me it seems. I spent a lot of time visiting old favorites, and this is also the year that I finally “groked” Path of Exile and allowed it to start dominating my life. The above list is every game that I spent time playing for more than three months. Some of these are going to be terribly deceiving because for example, you would think this year is dominated by Final Fantasy XIV and that would be a lie. What I did throughout the year was log in every 4-5 days and either go house shopping or retrieve my money because I failed to win a house in the lottery. Similarly, I played Guild Wars 2 quite a bit for several months in a row, and then have fallen into a routine of logging in and farming the guild halls for resources or doing the occasional world event, but not really spending a massive amount of time there.

Fallout 76 has been something I have quietly played off and on whenever the mood hit me, and it wasn’t really that I started actively talking about it until the rest of AggroChat got into it. New World was a major force in my year because I was either playing in maintenance mode for the first few months, playing on the PTR for the middle of the year and hit rerolling and hitting the game extremely hard for the last few months of the year. I decided to track World of Warcraft Dragonflight Alpha/Beta separate from World of Warcraft as a whole because I very much approached the game from a more clinical tester mindset. I’ve not actively played World of Warcraft legitimately since December 2020 and as such have not paid for a subscription either. Basically, my time in Dragonflight did not really feel like I was truly playing the game because I was playing a series of disposable characters for each testing session.

Apparently, I played Torchlight Infinite More than I thought

The game that sort of surprised me for how long I actually spent playing it is Torchlight Infinite. The weird thing about that is that I don’t really particularly like the game. I got into it from a testing standpoint and between mobile testing and PC testing, I dipped my toes into the water for six separate months. It isn’t a bad game necessarily but it isn’t exactly a game that compels me either. Similarly, I kept trying to play Monster Hunter Rise and never really attached to it. Whatever magic that kept me glued to Monster Hunter World for as long as it did seems to have passed because from what I can tell Rise is essentially a spiritual successor but I am just not finding it nearly as enjoyable. Lost Ark is similarly a game that I kept trying to enjoy, finally giving up on it and moving on with life. I am not entirely certain what it is about that game that I don’t enjoy but it is very much “not for me”.

Total Number of Games Played in Each Year

Something that I started doing last year is adding a bunch of graphs to this shindig. There seems to be a weird ebb and flow pattern arising from the number of games I played in a given year. There are years where I churn through a lot of games, and then years that I play significantly fewer. Considering the number of “forever” games that I engaged with, I would have thought this was going to be a low-count year I did have an exceptionally frantic few months in the beginning. January, February, and some of March I was a game-finishing machine. I was all about the single-player lifestyle and seemingly catching up for so much lost time. I thought that trend would carry forward but apparently, that did not, and starting in March I was diving hardcore into Guild Wars 2 and really finding a place for it properly in my life. Basically, I approached it with the level of gusto that I had Final Fantasy XIV several times in the past. Once that trend started it seemed to reignite my play of shared world games where admittedly I still mostly play like a single-player murder hobo.

Top Games of 2021 compared to 2022

Another thing that I like to do is compare the top games that I played this year against the top list of last year. The first thing I noticed as a trend is that this is the year that I effectively stopped playing mobile games. There is a period of time when lay in bed attempting to let sleep claim me, and that previously had been a time I played random mobile games. I would play a game for a few months, then when I got to the point where it started needing a financial investment I would bounce and move to another one. Instead, I have spent more time sifting through things like Instagram and Tumblr rather than playing a game. I have to be honest, the mobile gaming experience is fairly miserable in general on Android and I don’t really find that I am missing it.

I played an awful lot of Action RPGs, and while I had distanced myself from Diablo 3 in 2021… it made me miserable doing it. So this year saw a bit of a resurgence as I allowed myself to play it once more. I also branched out and played a lot of other games from Path of Exile to Undecember. Last Epoch is actually shaping up now to be a game worth playing and I am actively looking forward to the multiplayer client testing. Elder Scrolls Online and Destiny both fell by the wayside further and Guild Wars 2 really moved into the forefront of games I care deeply about. GW2 had been a title I had struggled to really understand for the better part of a decade and finally for whatever reason this past year it clicked for me. New World continues to be a major force in both years and while I was very much in a depressed state about the future of that game at this time last year, this year gave it a brand new lease on life.

Games Played Since the Start of This Project

Comparing my Top Games of All Time from Last Year and This Year

I am shifting things up a bit differently this year. In the past, I had posted a snippet of the larger chart and it didn’t really mean anything. Instead, I am looking specifically at the total months played counts at the end of this year s contrasted with where we were at the end of last year. World of Warcraft has finally been dethroned, but admittedly this is only due to some trickery and me not counting my time spent testing Dragonflight as me playing World of Warcraft. If you added the 4 months that I tested Dragonflight to the Warcraft totals, then you end up with Final Fantasy XIV finally tying it. For me, my “truth” is that I was not actually playing World of Warcraft but instead focused on rigorous testing and writing bug notes, so that is ultimately how I logged it but I could see the argument the other way around.

Destiny fell to third, and I found it funny that Diablo 3, Elder Scrolls Online, and Rift all held their relative positions at Third, Fourth, and Fifth. I technically did log into Rift and play for a little bit but not terribly munch. I was feeling nostalgic and trying to figure out what the hell I was doing the last time I played largely drove any of those feelings from me. Guild Wars 2 and New World shuffled the order as did Minecraft. You are not reading that wrong… I did in fact play Wildstar this year admittedly with the emulator server client that is deeply incomplete but I will be keeping tabs on that as it progresses. I do feel a bit bad because if trends continue to follow by this time next year Everquest II will have most likely been pushed off the list.

Games Played Longer than Six Months

Something that I started last year is charting all of the games that I have played for longer than six months in total. You can really see that there are six games that have dominated my landscape for the last decade and that is Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft, Destiny, Diablo 3, Elder Scrolls Online, and Rift. Of those I am no longer really playing World of Warcraft or Rift, so their influence will continue to be diminished while games like Guild Wars 2, New World, and Path of Exile are starting to gain ground. It will be interesting to see what this looks like in another decade if I keep up with this nonsense. I had been fairly regularly playing Magic the Gathering Arena but I largely stopped that. I am not entirely certain what led to me not playing it, but it has been ages since I have even booted it up to claim free cards, let alone sit down to play an actual game.

Another thing that I started last year is keeping track of my longest streaks. What I mean by that is the most months in a row that I have played at least some of the game. This list changes a lot more slowly because while I may shift through several games in a year, it is very rare that I keep at them for more than a few months at a time. New World is gaining ground as a serious contender at twenty-three months so far, and Path of Exile while much further back in the pack is gaining ground with seven months. It is going to be very hard for something to top the salad days of Destiny and how active I was in that game. Thirty-Three months is going to be extremely hard to top and even Diablo 3 had its streak broken last year.

Another Year in the Books

Sometimes I roll into this post with thoughts about what might be on the horizon for me as a gamer or blogger, but this time I really don’t know what the next year might hold. I thought last year that I would be focused more on single-player games, and while the first few months were definitely that… I quickly fell back into my shared environment gamer ways. I am so far removed at this point from regularly gaming with others, that I wonder if I will ever get back to my “pugging” for hours at a time sort of ways of my past. I’ve not raided in any form since 2016 and even then I was not the most serious raider. I think I might have largely closed that chapter in my life and instead, find comfort in having other people around… but doing my own thing.

For those who might want to go back in time and see how this series has evolved, I finally actually created a proper category on my blog for it. I know it only took me seven years to get around to doing this. I think one side goal is to do a better job of charting this data as the year is going on, rather than having a flurry of activity in the last few months trying to catch everything up. Another thing that I want to do is dive back into Guild Wars 2 and finally finish up my Skyscale so I can fly like a proper player of that game. Maybe even finish my Epic Weapon that I started and then largely walked away from. I would love to be able to dive back into Final Fantasy XIV but I wonder if that game is “finished” for me. I am feeling about it much like I felt about World of Warcraft at the end of Wrath of the Lich King. The narrative was wrapped up in a clean and satisfying manner and it is going to take a lot to really engage me in quite the same way as I had been for the last ten years.

What are your goals for the coming year? Do you think this whole game-tracking project that I keep doing is pure nonsense? Feel free to drop me a line below. I hope you all have had a great holiday season and that you have a phenomenal start to the new year.

Projects within Projects

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Good Morning Friends! I hope you are ready for another Path of Exile post because that is what you are getting! I realize that when I dive down into the esoterica of a particularly detail-oriented game I lose many readers. It is shocking that anyone reads me to be honest given that you have suffered through a deep dive into Guild Wars 2, New World many times, and a couple of Path of Exile leagues in the same year. I am way more in my element this league and have branched out into a bunch of side projects. I am thinking that is really what I need to start doing rather than beating my head against a particular obstacle until it yields. I encountered a bit of resistance in the Righteous Fire Juggernaut which lead me to run up the Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer… and resistance there has led me to dust back off the Toxic Rain Trickster. So essentially I have three major projects going at once and seeing an incremental increase in all of them… which makes me way happier than grinding my face against the walls I was hitting the Juggernaut.

At some point, I will get around to updating my Game Tools page for Path of Exile, but I thought I would take a moment this morning and talk about a few things that I am finding useful. The first is Better Trading for Path of Exile, which is a Chrome extension that adds a bunch of functionality, not the least of which is showing a history of things that you have searched for before. You can pin these as favorites if you find yourself going back to the trade website periodically to look for specific items. I use Firefox almost exclusively, but the extension is no longer being updated there so it is useful enough to make me do all of my POE Trading in Chrome. The guide that I followed for SRS even had importable links so you can find the gear that ticks the right boxes rather easily and import those saved items directly.

The other tool that I have been using is a replacement for the Overwolf-based POE Trading overlay called Awakened PoE Trade. This offers a bunch of functionality like the ability to flag specific attributes on maps that you don’t want to run and have it warn you when you mouse over maps with those specific attributes. However, the most useful thing to me personally is that I can hit Ctl+D while hovering over an item and it will pop up a details screen showing me what the current market price for an item like that would be. It was through doing this that I realized I was sitting on a 3 Divine chest piece that I should probably be using instead of my current Righteous Fire chest. If nothing else this is helping me to understand what elements make something valuable and at some point hopefully I can evaluate them myself.

I had been using the chest piece on the left for a while now and picked it up for 15c when I hit mapping and needed six links for Righteous Fire. At some point, I picked up the chest on the right and held onto it, because I knew the Astral Plate base was really good for Righteous Fire and that the colors were very close. It originally dropped as a six-link RRGGBB, whereas I currently need RRGBBB. In my many travels, I acquired a stash of tainted currency which you can use to modify corrupted items. I figured if it was worth 3 Divines with the wrong colors, it would surely be worth more if I fixed the colors and managed to hit it in 3 Tainted Chromatic Orbs. Then I got the quality up to 16% with some tainted armoring orbs… and at that point, I figured… I might as well give it a shot.

What it did for my Righteous Fire build is it took me over 50,000 Armor, which seems to be a significant break point. I went from getting wrecked by The Hydra to being able to largely face tank the fight. It has not fixed ALL of my problems but it has taken me a good step towards progress. It is weird how a single piece of gear that takes you to a specific breakpoint… seems to have that much immediate difference. So Righteous Fire Juggernaut is back on the menu and I spent quite a bit of yesterday just zipping around and clearing maps for fun and profit.

Another project that I need to devote some more time to is Delve and getting further down in progression. It bugs me that I am constantly capped on yellow delve juice and purposefully avoiding Niko missions. Basically, I need to spend a few days doing nothing but Delve because in truth I enjoy the heck out of it. Similarly, I have a massive stash of contracts and blueprints that I need to burn through over in Heist as well. If nothing else that seems to be the name of the game this season is fixing sustain problems. It is rare that I don’t get at least three or four maps out of a single map, and it is similarly rare that I don’t walk away with at least one contract. There is way more that I could be doing that I would enjoy doing… than I actually have time to do of it. This is a far better situation than the beginning of the Kalandra league when it felt like I was running out of every currency and not really able to find ways to get any of it.

Over on my Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer, I am in the process of making a number of changes. Currently, as things stand I can pretty comfortably wipe White and Yellow maps but struggle quite a bit with reds. I am not actually using the final configuration of the build and it is going to involve me either muleing a gem or to or just buying level 20 gems from the market. I need to sit down and properly map out what I want gem-wise on each piece of gear and then set forth to recolor as needed. It is shocking how much more comfortable I am with swapping resists, links, and colors on gear than I was in past leagues. Essentially one of the biggest changes that I need to make is to get rid of my Zombies and migrate over to Animate Guardian.

This is a rather big change because Animate Guardian works wildly differently than the other minion summons. Essentially you have to “build” your Guardian like you build a Follower in D3, but with a way more obtuse system behind it. Thankfully Ghazzy did a video on how this works, but essentially you “consume” items while mousing over and hitting Animate Guardian. Then from that point forward, your Animated Guardian is using that item. Luckily there are a bunch of bulk Uniques that I have laying around that apparently make up the suggested “low investment” build for an Animated Guardian and I’ve set these aside at the ready. Essentially you need a two-handed weapon, two one-handed weapons, or a one-hander and a shield combined with a helm, chest, gloves, and boots. This specific combination apparently gives a lot of buffs to both the player and other minions. So I’ve set aside the following items to be consumed once I get a level 20 Animated Guardian:

The challenge is that there is no way to get back any of these items once you have consumed them. However, they do stay “equipped” on your account in a sort of hidden Animated Guardian inventory. This is one of those deeply obtuse systems that could be improved with a UI around it. Similarly, the way that Raise Spectre works is equally dumb and involves me summoning corpses in my hideout and trying to raise one specific corpse… the Carnage Chieftan each time. Thankfully they rarely die so I don’t need to do this super often, but it is still tedious and if for some reason I end up overwriting the corpses available with desecrate… then I have to go back to The Old Fields in Act II and get new apes.

Then you of course have the Toxic Rain Trickster that I dusted off yesterday, set back up, and managed to clear Dominus and get the achievement for Shadow. I think right now I am missing Ranger and Scion and I will have completed the full gamut of classes through Act III. I’ve also got a truly stupidly geared level 6 Shadow sitting in the first map that I am trying to get the Beginner’s Luck achievement with. Seriously you should take a look at “BelginnersLuck” on my character list and how stupidly geared that is for a character that has never made it to Lion’s Arch. I am legitimately curious about what level I will be when Hillock finally drops a unique item. I’m to the point where I can take him down to half health with a single hit, then when he pulls the sword out and regenerates it takes another two hits to finish him off. The energy shield, health regen, and mana regen are overpowered at low levels… just saying.

Tomorrow I will be plumbing the depths of my play history for this year and doing my big round-up post. I hope you are enjoying your break and apologies for being quiet on social media. I tend to ignore the world when I get hyper-fixated on a specific game.

Steam Replay 2022

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Something that has been floating around the social networks this week is the Steam Replay. I do not remember this existing in past years, so it seems like this is something brand new for Steam and they appear to be taking a page from Spotify which has a similar practice. If you are curious you can look at my full replay here, but this morning I figured I would talk about it a bit. I do my own tracking thing that I am currently working on, but I do appreciate Steam handing me so much information on a platter. I tend to devote a certain amount of time in the last few posts of the year to reviewing the year as a whole and this flows right into that pattern. Steam creates a number of handy infographics ready for you to download and share on social media. The above image is “formatted for Twitter” but they also have a square format for Instagram if that is more your thing.

The first tidbit that I find interesting is just how high my session count is. I think this can be accounted for by two different behaviors that happen to me a lot. Firstly I often get into a game and then something comes up… cat knocks something over… wife needs my help… and I have to bail out of the game quickly. This is entirely why I bounced off Deathloop because that game refuses to let me save out quickly and return just as quickly to what I was doing. After failing to complete a stage three times because I kept getting interrupted I uninstalled the game and move on with my life. The other part of this is that I boot up a lot of games… and then do nothing with them. Sometimes I suffer from the “I have nothing to wear” syndrome where I have so many games but nothing quite sounds right. So before I settle in on something and hyper-focus for several days, I will often flail about trying to find the “right” game to play.

The thing that honestly shocks me with this one is the number of achievements. I realize in January and February I did burn through like twelve games in rapid fire, and honestly, that is probably why that number is so high. That is not exactly my normal pattern because in general, I do not give a fuck about achievements. I say that… but I am now going after a truly stupid achievement in Path of Exile that involves me playing a character up to Hillock and then logging out, and coming back and trying it again after the map resets all for the purpose of attempting to get a unique drop in that first map. I am not shocked that I spent most of my time playing either New World or Path of Exile because those really were the games of “this” year for me. Witcher 3 is so high because I poured into doing as close to 100% of the content run as I could when I was doing my “play everything to completion” thing at the start of the year.

I knew I was somewhat “out of band” in the sheer number of games I play in a given year… but I did not realize I was that far off. If I take this statement as evidence of how most people consume games, it would make me believe that the average gamer just plays a handful of games. The streak is interesting because I am almost certain that is New World, and it in truth should be longer because Steam tracks the Live client and the PTR client as separate games. There was a period of time when I was playing the PTR client every single day, and then when Brimstone Sands launched I switched over to playing Live again. The achievement count again I am certain is because in Dec/Jan/Feb I burned through a lot of single-player games.

This graphic shows how my gameplay stacks up as compared to new releases, recent releases, and what it calls a classic game… aka anything that is more than eight years old. I am sure some folks would bicker about the definition of “classic games” there, but I guess for me it makes sense. I do spend a lot of time jumping on the bandwagon of a brand-new game as it launches, but apparently only about a third of my gameplay is spent in that manner. I would have thought it was higher, to be honest. It does make sense that the bulk of my time is spent on games that release in the last few years because I often miss the launch and eventually get around to checking out the game a few years later. I think this is a side effect of how hyper-focused I can get on a single game and how I mostly push everything else aside when I am in that mode. Then there are just so damned many games coming out each year that it takes me a while to digest that they came out and get around to playing them.

This one confuses me quite a bit. Usually, when I see a graph like this, it denotes something like quadrants that are universal for everyone. This is clearly chosen from the games that I actually played during the year because no one would lay out a personality matrix based on these traits. It makes a lot of sense that MMORPG, Looter Shooter, and Medieval are so high on the list. That little corner seems to be my sweet spot. What I am shocked about is how high the Souls-like games are showing up on the list, but I guess that makes sense as well because I keep trying them… and then bouncing off them. Cyberpunk would be a much larger segment if I actually had bought Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam. I own it on GOG instead which means none of my playtimes is getting logged here. Dark Comedy though… no clue where that one is coming from because while yes I do love that genre I am not sure which games that I played this last year are contributing to that.

I am still working on my larger “Grand Experiment” post that I make each year, in which I have been tracking monthly play patterns since 2012. I thought it would be fun to talk through some of the things on my Steam Replay this year in the meantime. Valve has this bad habit of starting things and not necessarily carrying through with them, but I am hoping that this becomes a yearly tradition. I personally find evaluating my habits interesting, and it has been really cool to see some of the Replays of my friends. What are your thoughts? Did you enjoy the Steam Replay as a concept? Feel free to drop me a line below. I am not exactly sure WHEN I will make my big post, but given the trajectory, it is likely on Friday.

A Feast of Crows

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Hey Folks! I am continuing down this nonsense path of Summon Raging Spirits, and if this build continues like it has a strong likelihood of eclipsing my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. It isn’t that the Jugg is bad or anything, and it managed to get me all the way through T16 maps. The problem that I am having is that my gear isn’t quite good enough to make bossing feel good. I can absolutely get there, but the overwhelming popularity of the build has meant that anything RF Jugg friendly… is now ungodly expensive. I am wearing the wrong hat because I could not touch something with the same explicits on it and of the right armor base for anything short of 20 divines. This gets into the problem I have talked about before of the league tending to consider “less than 100 divines” as a “light investment”. I saw my very first raw divine drop yesterday… on the SRS Necro.

I have most of the build locked in so far and am about to build into my first large cluster. For the most part, it was easy to find the pieces that I needed because I am not sure if the league has caught onto how powerful this build really is. There is a poison variant that Balor has been shopping around that is catching steam, as well as a number of the meta-exploration videos have brought it up as a contender. The thing is I think most folks built into RF Jugg based on the statistics and it is probably unlikely that they are going to be building something else. While I enjoyed the RF playstyle, it feels like it is balancing a bunch of plates in the air when it comes to regeneration and elemental resists. If anything negative impacts either, you are sorta fucked. It also never really felt great up against bosses and felt awful in the Sanctum.

Last night I spent about 100 chaos upgrading items for my SRS Necro and I am getting close to what appears to be an endgame viable build. The thing is… this gear is functionally better for what it is than a lot of what I am wearing currently on my RF Jugg. The key difference being it cost me 100 chaos instead of the 200 divines or so it would cost me to kit myself out in equivalent gear designed for Righteous Fire. The market meets the demand and this league folks have demanded gear for the Pohx Juggernaut variant. I am simply not good enough at crafting to really be able to homebrew the gear that he is outlining, which means I have had to rely on the trade boards and those prices really reflect its popularity. I have the wrong Eater implicit on my gloves currently but that is just because I ran out of orbs and will keep chipping away at that as I do more blue altars. My hope is that I can start using the SRS Necro soon to do those for hopefully better results.

As far as defenses go I am in a decent enough state for early mapping, namely that I can easily soak up another 30% nerf from the second Kitava kill. I need to spend some effort fixing my Chaos and right now I have neck and helm to work with that are not yet upgraded. I should be able to find a better Amethyst ring that should help some as well, but I went with something I had vaulted during my RF Jugg leveling process. Luckily the anoint that this build once is cheap enough and I should be able to pick the Grave Intentions notable up relatively quickly after I upgrade my amulet. That leaves the helm as the trickiest piece that is very likely going to be a crafting project. I have a white-quality helm from the base type at level 88… and I just have to go through a bazillion orbs until I get both +2 minion gems and some sort of resist on the same item. I have enough Harvest materials to swap a resist out if I have to.

I do however think I probably want to start running some maps before I invest much more in this build. As of last night, I am sitting in Act 10, and in theory, after I beat Kitava and see where my resists are sitting I am going to dive into my bulk maps and see how well this performs. The Raven MTX though makes the Summon Raging Spirits all the more enjoyable.