MOBA Archives - Page 6 of 10 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Alliance of Awesome

June 7, 2014 by Belghast

Multigaming Community

On January 31st a few interesting things happened. Firstly Sony Online Entertainment released the alpha for Everquest Next Landmark… now just known as Landmark. More importantly this set a chain of events into motion. For some time there has been a group of loosely affiliated guilds and gaming communities tugging on essentially the same pool of players. So we might end up getting this mix of players for a specific title and then having a similar mix of players for another title down the road from this huge twitter/g+ gaming community pool. With Landmark this reached a bit of a head and someone was brave enough to stand up and say it was silly. In the opening days of Landmark, since there were no guilds (and still arent for that matter) each of these communities opted to start a chat channel. The problem is this left some people joining as many as six different channels at a time.

Scarybooster proposed a simple idea, that we all agree to use one common chat channel, and with that the Alliance of Awesome was born. It started simple in scope, but from there Zelibeli and I kinda ran with it and over the last four months we’ve built a rather large loosely connected gaming alliance. Currently we have five different groups in the AofA community: House Stalwart, Multiplaying.net, Combat Wombat, Mercy Gaming, and Dark Religion. Lately I have been talks with Liore about maybe having the already awesome Machiavelli’s Cats community join the fold as well. I have to say so far that over the last four months things have indeed been awesome. For the most part everyone has seemed to get along swimmingly and I’ve watched this group of disconnected pieces merge into a community in every sense of the word.

A Simple Idea

One of the big problems with being habitual multigamers is the fact that guilds are often transistory and it is hard to constantly muster a new batch of people to play whatever game is coming down the pipe. Additionally since not every game will end up being ideal for everyone, this means you have massive amounts of fragmentation as folks leave a given game for something new. The idea was that each individual guild would take responsibility for the reigns of the games that they were most into, and then that way as gamers we would have access to a good and familiar guild regardless of the game we choose to play. Over the coming months I would like to see this formalized into a sort of Rosetta stone for who has which guilds where and just how active each of them are.

The problem is that since we each have our own guild identities, it felt odd to constantly ask players to register an account on a new forum for each group. As a result we tried a few different things to have a shared neutral ground between the communities. The first of these efforts was the Alliance of Awesome reddit… and while it worked well enough, it caused as much frustration as it solved. Then I stumbled onto Anook and it seemed almost perfectly suited for us. It offered public and private forums, an events calendar and was more gamer social network than private site allowing folks to link everything up to the games they are streaming into the shared hub… or in the verbiage of that network a “nook”. This also lets the bloggers in our midst share our posts easily on the nooks blog, and so far that seems to also be working well.

A Unified Approach

Over the last few months we have been melding significantly. Elder Scrolls Online launch for example was the first real “Alliance of Awesome” foray, and while we still kept to the branding of House Stalwart… it was very much a shared occasion. With the launch of Wildstar, we had no real forerunner guild wise that looked to be taking up the reigns. Instead we opted to drop any specific guild branding and simply go with the “Alliance of Awesome” for our guild name. Honestly I have to say it feels very natural and I can see eventually we may drop the individual guild monikers and just do things from that standpoint.

The biggest problem I forsee moving forward is the fact that right now we are still very much utilizing two completely separate voice servers. A good chunk of the House Stalwart guild is still very happily playing World of Warcraft and doesn’t really care about any other game on the market. The rest of us are pretty nomadic, but we still are far more used to and comfortable with mumble as a communication platform. Multiplaying, Dark Religion, and Mercy Gaming have all standardized on a Teamspeak 3 server run for free by the ever amazing Saia. So I would really like to make a move to trying to use that as well and simply dropping the mumble. That said this feels like a landmine because I have no clue how to convince the WoW-only contingency to abandon mumble and make the shift over to Teamspeak 3. Also I hate to abandon Mumble myself until they have done this, because while I am not playing World of Warcraft on a nightly basis I still hold the guildmaster position and get called on to resolve issues. I want to make sure I am reachable by folks even when I am not in the same game.

Shared Ethics

The other rough spot is that we need to come up with a shared set of rules and codes of conduct. For years House Stalwart has followed a simple “three tenets” approach, and relied on guild leader and officer judgment to fill in the gaps. Zeli tends to favor spelling things out, and considering the large volume of people she has dealt with not completely organically connected… I can totally see why this would be a good thing. After years of trying to “keep things simple” but then having to deal with explaining nuance… I am starting to favor Zeli’s approach to be honest. I hate writing rules, and as such that’s why I came up with the somewhat ambiguous three that we use. I figured that using common sense folks would realize what they meant… problem is not everyone “common” is the same. The further away from the same core of friends you get, the more confusing the interpretation becomes.

Going forward I think we are going to have to just agree upon a shared set of rules, and I think so far the batch Zeli came up with for the Alliance of Awesome guild seems like a great place to begin. The biggest thing I hope out of this is that we are a living community. That we will continue to grow as we adopt other awesome people from twitter, anook, g+, or that we happen to stumble across in game. Also I hope that we do in fact get the Machiavelli’s Cats community to join the fold, and keep finding other like minded groups to rally to the cause. I would really like Alliance of Awesome to not only have an ostentatious name, but also have awesome actions to back it up. I want us to be part of the solution in the games we play, and not part of the problem. I would love to see us better each of the gaming communities we are in.

Giving Back

File:Child's Play Logo updated.png One of the things that Zeli and I have been talking about lately is that we would really like to enter Alliance of Awesome in this years Child’s Play marathon. Far as I can tell this will take place on October 25th, and the idea is to have 25 hours of live streaming for charity. I have wanted to participate in this for years, but I thought it would be more interesting if we signed up a whole bunch of streamers from the Alliance of Awesome community and have one shared channel for the purpose of the event. We have quite a number of people who stream already, and it would be awesome to give each of us like a 4-5 hour block of time to play whatever the hell we want to.

Also lately we have been holding a lot of events in various games. Right now Wednesday nights are “Faff About in Cyrodil” night, and those are pretty much only to anyone in the Alliance of Awesome community. Additionally we have been holding a Thursday night “League Beginner Night” to let folks ease into the League of Legends game. So far both events have been a blast and I would love to see them grow beyond the small number of people that we have. I am sure we will be doing something similar for Wildstar, especially with the focus on grouping in that game. I can only see the community as a whole getting better. So here comes the thing I am sure you have all been waiting for. If you are not already a member of the Alliance of Awesome community… head over to the website and join our nook. We don’t have any real requirements for membership other than wanting to be around a bunch of awesome people, and striving to be the “white hats” in gaming. If you have a large community, track down myself or Zelibeli and we can see if the entire group would be a good fit for us as well. Growing up as an only child, I always wanted to be surrounded by friends… and on the internet I try my damnedest to surround myself with as many awesome people as I can. So far I think things are going pretty well.

Crystal Madness

June 6, 2014 by Belghast

Permanent Exhaustion

Back in March my wife and I each purchased a fitbit, and since then it has rewired quite a few things in our daily routine. Over the first few month we mostly focused on changing the way we walked, and picking up steps in places we could during our normal routine. So instead of taking the elevator in the parking garage, I started walking the stairs… and have now changed that up to walking the ramps down for maximum steps. In many ways the fitbit changes exercise into a game, and with it comes a whole slew of “achievements” being tracked by the fitbit dashboard. While what it does is rather stupid… it is just an always on pedometer, the fact that it is there and constantly reminding me that I need to be walking is where the real benefit comes in.

Over the last month we have been walking on a nightly basis, and within the last week and a half this has morphed not only into walking to augment our total steps… but to trying every night to “ding”. My wife is not a gamer really, but she has picked up my MMO analogy when it comes to the fitbit. For us dinging is getting to our target steps of 10,000 per night, and this is fitting since the little band goes nuts when you reach your target goal. While trying to hit 10,000 is cool… my new goal is trying to hit 70,000 weekly steps and getting the achievement associated with it. Why do I care? Well it has been looming there for months… and it was a thing I never thought I would actually be able to hit.

More than anything this whole experience has been a lesson in proving me wrong. I’m fat, and I will likely always be fat. At 6’4” I carry my 350 lbs more better than some… but I am still very much a fat man, and I am mostly okay with that. More than anything I want to be a more “fit” fat and have more stamina and endurance… and I have already come so damned far already. Granted right now I am somewhat living in a state of permanent exhaustion as I try and do this exercise thing each night and also do my evening gaming. Right now we are walking a little over 2 miles per night, and doing what we call our “triple loop” where we weave a course through our neighborhood and the next one over. The course is designed so it never takes us past our house, that way we are not tempted to call it and stop. Right now I need to have walked between 6500 and 7000 steps to be able to hit 10-11k during my evening walk. With it being a rainy and otherwise sedentary weekend… we might have to start walking a “quint loop”, but by god I will hit my 70,000 steps this week.

Crystal Madness

I had all intents of streaming last night, but for whatever reason it never quite happened. I spent a good deal of the evening running down the last few things I needed to do to complete Deredune, and what I was doing… while enjoyable for me seemed like it would be extremely boring to watch. As the evening wore on, more people joined me in the channel… and I simply never alt tabbed to fire up OBS. Wildstar is latching onto me with a vengence, and in ways I am surprised. You can go through my pre-launch posts… and I struggled hard to figure out a way to get into this game. I wanted so bad to like it, because at face value it seemed like a game I would love… or at the very least the me from five years ago would have loved. Overall it intrigued me enough to play it at launch, especially since I would be bringing with me a chunk of the Alliance of Awesome community.

Now that I have spent a good deal of time playing it… I am completely enthralled. The thing is I am not sure exactly why. Guild Wars 2 is one of those games that I have tried to dissect just why I don’t enjoy it, and no matter what I try and do there… the game felt largely pointless. Wildstar feels like it took so many of the good elements of GW2 but presented them in a way that I actually care about them. Problem is I am not sure if I can explain why. For starters there is something psychologically enjoyable about challenges. You can be wandering around and loot an item… and then all the sudden you on the clock and every fiber of your being is poured into completely whatever this task happens to be. Sure you can ignore them, and start them manually from the challenges section of your quest log… however there is something special about just stumbling onto one naturally.

The game has a depth that I have not seen since Everquest 2, and that really shocked me. There are layers within layers within layers of nuance going on here. Right now it seems to have every feature that I ever wanted in a game. While it doesn’t have a “chronomage” style self mentoring system, you can apparently drop your level down to your party members at any time. In fact so many of the things in the game seem to be there to help you group with your friends. The only real thing that the game fails at is in still continuing to divide players into red and blue teams. That said I can for the most part deal with this, since they have account based friends and I can at the very least talk to my friends on the other side of the faction wall. I have reached a point where I am pretty sure already that this is my new “WoW”, and had I not already purchased Warlords of Draenor… I would seriously consider skipping this expansion.

The picture above is pretty cool because it is from my skyplot. One of the nifty things is that while you are out in the world, you are constantly collecting things for your house. A special kind of item that you can find is a “PreFab Kit” and these allow you to build new sections of your skyplot. While wandering around I managed to find a green quality one that essentially added a crazy jumping puzzle to my house. So the fact that it is a jumping puzzle in itself is cool… but it basically added a daily quest to my house. If you can make it to the top of the puzzle in 1 minute 10 seconds you can get a prize, which is similar to the prizes you normally get from challenges. I’ve managed to pick up a handful of housing items from doing this, including a really cool spiral tree. If you are on Evindra/Dominion let me know and I will neighbor you so you can have access to do the puzzle.

League Beginner Night

I feel like maybe this week the title of our weekly League of Legends night might be a bit of a misnomer. We had several folks, but not quite enough to do two matches at the same time. So as a result we alternated swapping folks in and doing 5 man vs Bots games to let folks get adjusted to new champions. Oakstout joins us this week and it turns out that while he signed up for a beginner night… he owns a whole slew of champions and has like 130 wins under his belt or something like that. So I would hardly call him a beginner, in fact I am far more beginnerly than he was. That said it was still an awesomely fun time and we hung out and joked while playing the game. I played a total of three games, the first of which I tried out the champion Gangplank that was free this week. I have to say I dig him quite a bit, and if he goes on sale again soonish I might pick him up.

The second round I played Aatrox, which I still absolutely love for his pure survival. During this battle Oak was playing one of my all time favorite champions WuKong… but the combination meant we got to bully our lane severely. Our double jumps meant we could engage quickly and shred the enemy bots quickly before returning to farming or taking down turrets. I have decided though that I really need to pick up the Justicar Skin since I don’t really care much for Aatrox’s default appearance. Finally I closed out the night by playing a game as Woad King Darius… which we have all agreed is the “most belghast skin ever”. It was a great time, and if you are looking to ease your way into League of Legends, then I highly suggest you participate next week. At some point I figure we will even start to play real people.

#Wildstar #LeagueOfLegends #LoL

Ramble About Content

June 5, 2014 by Belghast

Story Content

I was having a discussion yesterday with some friends about whether or not the MMO player actually wants carefully crafted story driven content. When you look at the lackluster support that Elder Scrolls Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic and The Secret World have gotten overall, you could easily come to this conclusion… since each of them are deeply story driven and carefully constructed experiences. I think we are maybe seeing something else at work. If you look at a game like World of Warcraft, some of its deep story arcs have long been heralded as some of players favorite content. However the vast majority of the content is nothing like this, and I think it is simply a case of not everything has to be “art”.

It is in essence the filler content, that is just good enough to keep you from throwing up your hands in frustration, that make you appreciate that gem in the rough of a quest. Games like ESO, SWTOR and TSW attempted to infuse deep story and meaning into almost everything you do, therefore shifting story driven content to the status of a commodity. I suggest that games need busy work, to make you appreciate the transcendent content when it is placed in front of you. The “kill ten rats” quests are there to cleanse the palates so to speak, so that when a deeply engaging story arc is put in front of you… you actually take notice and don’t resign it to more content to grind through.

Epic Crafted Content

When I think about epic custom crafted experiences I think of the Mass Effect series. I have gushed on this game so much, and watched friends play it over and over. As much as I enjoyed the entire trip through the series… it is not the type of game that I would want to play every night. That ultimately is the problem with MMOs, you are asking players to come in and inhabit your space… hopefully making it a nightly traditional to log in and play with their friends. As much as I might like a Mass Effect or a Transistor… I wouldn’t want to play these games on a nightly basis. I want a space that is much more malleable, and doesn’t require so much of myself to play it. Essentially one friends assessment that MMO content “needs to be exactly good enough to be passable” is really not too far off the mark.

One thing that the busy work tasks excel at is helping drive your own personal narrative forward. The players who inhabit an MMO and really live there on a night by night basis, whether they realize it or not, are crafting a custom narrative about their character based on their own actions. Each time you kill some baddies, save a villager, or deliver a package to some far away mountain… these actions are complementary to whatever narrative you have in your head about your own character. When you ask a player to participate in something longer, more story driven… the end results are predetermined and may or may not be complimentary with this personal narrative. When you have a few of these long epics scattered throughout the game, they are welcome interludes. However when everything you do is based on some narrative that you don’t necessarily fully control… it can be jarring.

Grouped Content

While I would not want to play Mass Effect every single night, I still want to play it often… so there sets up the paradox. Right now I find myself compartmentalizing games as either “fun to play with other people” and “fun to play by myself”. Elder Scrolls Online is very much fun to play by myself, with brief flurries of playing with friends when it comes to dungeon and pvp content. This is part the game and part me. Firstly I hate questing as a group, and it has been something I have tried to avoid like the plague since the early days of World of Warcraft. I’ve always found the experience to be generally frustrating since someone is always a step behind or a step ahead of where you happen to be. Trying to keep people in sync is madness… but Wildstar and its focus on leveling the guild through grouped content is trying to change this.

They’ve given me a hook, a reason to group up that so many other games haven’t. I greatly prefer to experience “content” by myself and then group up to do “group content” whenever I can. But the fact that the only real way to level your guild is through players grouping up together and doing content, makes the entire concept of group questing much more friendly. They’ve given me a shiny bauble for my troubles, and also given me tools to make the entire grouping experience more meaningful in the way the various “paths” interact with one another. So this construct is making me re-evaluate the way I think about content in general, and start looking for ways to group up to accomplish things rather than solo everything.

In part my reluctance to group comes from my Everquest roots where your ONLY option was to group for everything. When MMOs gave me the option to be self sufficient, I took it and ran with it and have simply never looked back. So in a game like Elder Scrolls Online, I greatly prefer to be wandering around by myself. I go AFK frequently, often have to take my headset off to respond to my wife, and am generally not always super engaged with what I am doing. In short I feel like I am a liability for grouping, and in those cases I try and solo the entire night. The problem is this becomes a pattern with me, and I simply NEVER group unless it is content that I can’t do by myself. I find it interesting that Wildstar is somewhat successfully making me re-evaluate that point, and seeing that grouping is something that is beneficial to me, the guild, and the players I am grouped with.

Room For Both

Another thing I have learned about myself is that I seem to always need a “WoW”. I am talking about this in super generic terms because the game has shifted at various times… but I always seem to be playing one. Traditionally this has been me shifting back and forth between playing World of Warcraft and Rift… while at the same time playing a game like The Secret World or Elder Scrolls Online. Wildstar seems to be my new “WoW” game in this equation, and it speaks to my desire to play that type of themepark/themebox type experience. The thing is there is always going to be room for an Elder Scrolls Online as well. I find myself right now wanting to pair down to just those two games, even though I have a ton of other games that I somewhat want to play. It is like I have various itches that need scratching on a regular basis, and no one game ever quite covers them all. However between a combination of those two games it might get close to covering all the bases.

The more I play Wildstar and enjoy it because it is new and shiny and exciting… the more I want to spend my weekend delving into Elder Scrolls Online and exploring Auridon and more of the Veteran level Aldmeri content. I functionally need both experiences, because so far I have not been able to get both from the same game. However after seeing the lackluster reception that Elder Scrolls has received versus the glowing recommendation of players for Wildstar, it is pretty clear that most players just want a better “WoW”. There is no shame in this, because to some extent that has been what I have been looking for as well. I want to visit these worlds with rich story, but I want to “live” on a nightly basis in one that is more of a “choose your own adventure” novel. Wildstar inundates me with choices of things to do… and there is a never ending list of achievements and things to explore, giving me a constant stream of adventures to be had.

League Beginner Night

I realize this mornings post has been an odd rambling one… without much of a firm point. I blame a clear lack of sleep on my part, and a measure of exhaustion on another. Hopefully there is something worth reading up there in that big mess. Tonight is the Alliance of Awesome League Beginner night again, and if you are a member of the AofA community I highly suggest you check it out. The start time is 9pm CST, but if we have a critical mass of players on mumble beforehand we might start a little early. Last week we had enough time to play a 3v3 Twisted Treeline and a 5v4+bot Summoners Rift. We had a ton of fun in the process.

If you have never played League of Legends before, and have been interested in getting into it… now is the ideal time to try it out. Last week we had several first timers, and to make things easier we broke apart into separate mumble channels to help tutor the new folks in what they should build and where they should be focusing their efforts. This in part involved me barking orders to Maric quite a bit, but he seems to have survived just fine and is signed up for this week again. I am still very much a newbie myself, but as a whole it is a really fun time to be had and presents a wild divergence from the types of games I normally play. I wish we had enough people in Heroes of the Storm to be able to have a similar night for that game.

Too Many Games

May 30, 2014May 29, 2014 by Belghast

I’m a Cheater

Once again I am doing what I consider cheating… which is writing up a post at night that I intend to post in the morning. Basically tomorrow is another one of those “ride in together” days, because directly after work we have a big end of school cookout thing to go to. So I simply won’t have much time to do my faff about verbally thing tomorrow morning. As such I am staging a post tonight, and doing the same thing everyone else… but for whatever reason I feel like I am somehow betraying the ritual by doing. Today’s topic I have been kicking around for awhile, so I figure this is as good of a time to spring it on my adoring readers… look I like to pretend I have adoring readers okay.

Too Many Games

Right now things have reached a sort of critical mass with me, and there are entirely too damned many games right now that I want to be playing. This could not have hit at a worse time considering how busy the tail end of school is combined with the fact that we have weddings and graduations and such to attend. Normally I feel like I can reasonably juggle three to four games at a time bouncing back and forth between them. The other day I posted saying that multi-gaming was even an awesome thing to do… considering it kept you from getting bogged down in the decisions a game company makes that you don’t necessarily agree with. However for me, I am spreading myself super thin with a ton of different activities that I want to be doing. So today I am going out outline each of the games that I am playing and lament the things I would love to have time to do in them.

Elder Scrolls Online

Right now I still consider Elder Scrolls Online my primary game. At roughly two months since headstart I am still very much loving this game. It has some problems, namely with difficulty of grouping, but as far as the game itself goes I dig it massively. I’m working my way through Auridon and slowly creeping up on Veteran Rank 2. I have so much that I still want to do in this game, but lately my schedule has limited my time in it. This is the type of game that I can only really play if I am fully focused on it, and this is doubly so with the veteran content. Shit can go wrong in a heartbeat if you are not doing all the right things, so it means on the nights I am not feeling all that… I end up playing something else.

Wildstar

This game is the new hotness it seems and it launches tomorrow, at least for the headstart folks. I mostly preordered this game in case I decided I was in love with it, and I wanted to make sure I secured the preorder bonuses. I really dig the pre-order house, and I did not care for anything in the Collectors Edition pack… so I went with the normal. I am still so up in the air about this game… there are things I like and things I don’t like. Right now I am simply not sure who is going to win out, however since everyone is playing it, and it scratches the same itch that World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic do… going to give it a good college try.

ArcheAge

Speaking of games I am conflicted about… welcome to ArcheAge. I find so much about this game intriguing and repulsive at the same time. It is this fusion of one of the most interesting games system wise and class wise… combined with one of the worst communities I have experienced. This game has invented new ways for you to grief your fellow players… and this is the sort of thing I have zero interest in. That alone would be enough to make me go running and screaming into the night… but the class system is so damned interesting to me. I love the concept of “Rift without Restrictions” and that is pretty much what the open class system seems like. It reminds me so much of the way the class system for Horizon worked… and that is a great thing.

Heroes of the Storm

I want so badly to be playing this game right now… but I also want so badly to not be playing this game with strangers. The MOBA thing is one of those things that I really only enjoy if I am queuing with people I know. That said supposedly the queue times are greatly improved with the new client. If you are in the HoTS alpha… please let me know! I need more people to queue with, and I feel horrible for being in this game when so many people want in… and not playing it much.

Defiance

The last few nights I have been playing this game again and really enjoying myself. The whole shift in how I approach it has really helped quite a bit. I would love to see more people playing it because I think it would be far more enjoyable to run around as a group. I still have yet to really scratch the surface of any of the story content, and feel like I should do that. Really enjoyed the first season of the television show, and would love to get caught up on the in game content before the next season starts.

Final Fantasy 5

At this point I am behind my friends in this game, and quite honestly I am struggling to get the oomph to play it. That said I feel like I should really finish this game as part of the FF5 draft thing we did. I feel like I would be a horrible person if I didn’t finish it. That said I also know I am going to get talked into doing the Four Job Fiesta in a month… so not sure if I will finish before then either.

Trove

There is something about this game that makes my inner child squeal with glee. Things are just so damned much fun, and the mob design is amazing. That said I have been out so long and so much is changing on what seems to be a near weekly basis that I feel hopelessly lost. At some point I need to resort to reading through all of the patch notes starting around the time I last played in the hopes of understanding how things have changed. The combat in this game is just enjoyable, I only wish I could play it with a controller. I guess in theory I could use one of the keypad mappers but I have been lazy.

Landmark

Oh Landmark… how I love you and am completely bored with you at the exact same time. Right now it is less a game and more a toybox for you to build in, with a ruleset wrapped around it. This was really fun while I had giant things to build… and while I was progressing through the ranks of collecting the next best mining pick. Now that I have topped out, and have fleshed out most of what I wanted to build… I log in pretty much only to mine copper and pay my upkeep. What I need to make me care about this game is the combat system. Here is hoping I will fall back in love with it when I can run around the world killing things.

Diablo 3

I still don’t have a character to 70, and I feel like I have somehow failed for not doing this. Basically this released way too close to the launch of Elder Scrolls Online… and I never gave the game the attention it deserves. At some point soon I really want to work on leveling my crusader, since I have technically beaten the game on my Monk. I am struggling with the desire to simply grind the last two levels to ding 70. I figure at some point I will have a renaissance of caring about d3… but it might be awhile before I cycle around to it again.

Rift

The new souls were released and I have yet to even check them out. I really would like to level my cleric to 60 before the 3.0 patch hits, but I have no clue how long that is. Right now I am logging in on a weekly basis to get my patron gifts and that is about it. I thought it would be really cool to do a streaming series where I try and remember how to tank, and do a public service of tanking elites. I’ve heard the queue times are absolutely insane, and I know personally I have waited over two hours without getting a DPS queue. I still love this game, but at the same time don’t really know what I want to do in it.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

A few weeks back I was playing the hell out of SWTOR and enjoying myself. While I have let my subscription lapse again… I would love to pick back up on my Sith Juggernaut and see what happens after Balmorra. I have never actually made it off this planet imperial side, but I was really damned close to doing this when I was last playing. The real challenge will be if I can manage to play the game without subscribing… or will I re-up again only to cancel a few weeks later.

World of Warcraft

Finally there is good ole World of Warcraft. Once upon a time I had a grand idea of getting everyone to 90 before the expansion. I have failed miserably at keeping up with this ambition, but who knows if I will actually do this or not. Right now all I have left are the Priest, Monk and Warlock… all of which are over 60 at the least. The Warlock and Priest are both in Pandaria content, but at the very beginning. I might get a wild urge to play again and push these guys across the finish line. Either that or I might completely abandon this until the release of Warlords of Draenor. In any case the account is still active, because I pop in periodically to dink around with stuff for the guild.

Nothing at All!

Tonight I will be playing…. nothing more than likely. We have an end of school cookout and by the time we get done there… we will likely crash, or walk… or walk then crash. If anything I launch Wildstar and create my characters. Right now I am planning on having my Chua Engineer and an Exile Warrior of some sort… just not sure if that will be Human or Granok. In any case I have nothing exciting to report about my master plan for the evening other than hanging out in the real world and eating some good food.