Pokémon Go Upcoming Feature Chatter; I can't tell if I'm interested.

So sometime last month this game called Pokémon Go was released into the wild and app stores blew up and Niantic managed to bring the global gaming community together to support each other while waiting for servers to stop burning.

I work in the city and so I had the joy of seeing the city map fill up with lures all throughout the workday. You always knew when something cool popped up because people would be standing in the same corner together, the suits and the jeans. And everyone would be making that same gesture on their phone like they've never used a touch screen before. Yeah, you know that gesture. Pokéball GO! GO! GO!

The one advantage of being in a rather ill-tempered area like the middle of DC is that you don't get as many people who stop or meander in the streets as they catch Pokémon. Folks familiar with the city know to step aside or risk getting to know what the wrong side of someone else's bed looks like.

I work in between two Pokéstops, which was pretty sweet. I say "was" because I admit I don't play much anymore. I've been level 22 for most of August. I fired up the app today because a friend had posted something about upcoming features. The map was a lot quieter. Perhaps everyone had finished using up their free lures. Maybe most folks just got a bit bored of it, like me.

There just isn't a good end game for me right now. No, I wasn't an avid Pokémon fan before this game launched. I didn't know much about Pokémon at all. The game has gotten me interested in learning a bit so I watch some of the episodes. I'm a gamer and I've always thought a game that got people moving would be cool. That guy that caught them all said he lost like 10 lbs doing it (and a whole lot of sleep).

But for someone like me who doesn't have the childhood dream of "being the very best" and "gotta catch'em all", the game lost its appeal very quickly. There just wasn't a good connection between catching Pokémon, throwing them in the meat grinder, feeding them as delicious candies to your other unwillingly cannibalistic Pokémon, catching more, training more, rinse, repeat. And then gym. And then get your most powerful Pokémon kicked out of said gym before you get around the block. It wasn't a particularly well thought out system. It wasn't created to handle the level of activity the game got. Half a dozen people standing around a gym swapping it back and forth for the equivalent of $0.10 got stale very quickly.

One night we were out in our car battling a nearby gym when we saw another car pull up. We went into stealth mode (read: we dropped down our seats and turned off our screens). Sure enough, it was a fellow Pokémon Go trainer. They fought the gym, assigned a Pokémon and then sped off. A short while later, their name appeared in another nearby Gym. So that was what you needed, at the time. To drive fast, be in a city with lots of gyms, and hope to get the maximum number of gyms before collecting your coins. $0.40? $0.50? I'm pretty sure their gas cost more than that.

Now it seems there's been a bit of chatter on Reddit by some code sleuths who say that it looks like trading and legendary Pokémon may be on the way. A Reddit user posted some interesting Pokémon Go code snippets like Trade_offer and activity_catch_legend_pokemon.

So my parents are going to Asian next month and I told them to get me some Farfetch'd. Since you know... they're region specific Pokémon. 

Code sleuthing in gaming has become quite a thing. There are a lot of gamers who enjoy digging into code and looking for the next tidbit. Call me cynical if you'd like, but if a (good) game developer really wanted to keep something quiet, they can and will. If users dig up little morsels of information it is generally because developers leave them there for us to find. So it all boils down to Niantic acknowledging the features that users have been asking for the most, features like trading and legendary Pokémon. They can just say they're working on it. But who hasn't heard that line a hundred times before? Instead, they say it by adding these new ids in and letting users find them. It seems more real. But I think it's healthy skepticism to realize this discovery is also engineered and make them look closer than they are. They've got warning signs for that, you know.

So the question is: when? I'm not quite ready to be hooked back in, especially if one of those upcoming features doesn't include more incentives to battle. Maybe give me a gym badge or something... Gym badges that level up for those gyms! I hope you caught that Niantic, because these tokens are so bland.

Oh, wow.

Wow. It has been so long since I posted here. Life spun on and on. I've changed jobs twice, moved twice, bought a place, found some new hobbies, started an Etsy store, and the list goes on. All the while I still game. I don't think I can ever stop gaming. I do wish I could have 30 hours a day. So many things to do, so many games to play and just so, so little time!

I'm very sorry that I haven't updated this in so many years. It's totally my fault. The worst part is I can't even promise now that I won't neglect this blog from time to time, for unknown lengths of time. But if you see this post, whoever you are, I'm happy you are here!

So what has happened in the last 4 (oh my gosh, wow) years? I still shout when I game, I guess that isn't going to change too quickly, but I really try. Truly, I do

As for what games I've been on, I spent a lot of time on Mincraft between 2012 and 2015. Much of it was on Feed the Best. My brother set up a super awesome server and we played together on that for many iterations. I always loved setting up biofuel, as inefficient as it was:

I spent hundreds of hours on Guild Wars 2. I was totally let down by Archage. I purchased a GTX 970 just so I could play Fallout 4 and ARK: Survival Evolved. I tried SWTOR for a little while (and broke the game for myself by making too much money). I've tried a variety of new games, AAA and indie. Frankly, there are just too many to list. Don't Starve, Dying Light, Darkout. FTL. Darkest Dungeon. Path of Exile. Too many to remember and list. These days I spend most of my time (what little time I have spare) on League of Legends and Entropia Universe.

I suppose the biggest change is I have changed my standard IGN. I floated around, being this skittle flavor and that skittle flavor. Eventually I got around to mango flavor and that stuck for a while. One surreal day, I found out "mangoskittle" was already taken. Outrageous! I tried "iMango" but to no avail. That was taken too. But I had my heart set on Mango and I was gonna have it! And so I turned it all around and here we are today. It's interesting to think about the power we have in the digital universe to create and recreate ourselves at our whim. I certainly couldn't go up to my neighbor downstairs and say, "Hey actually, I want to be called Rawonda from now on." But here, we can. A clean slate is a name change away. Not that I'm looking for clean slates...

Hello. I'm Ognami!

And that's why I always come back to Spiral Knights...

Last summer I chanced upon Spiral Knights, a F2P (I do love my F2Ps); a cute adventure-y, dungeon crawl-y game where you play a little knight, traveling ever lower towards :The Core!:

I played it constantly for months. The jist is that you slowly accumulate mist energy over time. You get approximately 100 a day. It takes 10 to travel each level down. The in game currency is crown, which is earned from looting as you explore and selling items to fellow knights.

The goal is always to accumulate enough crown to be able to stock up a back up supply of crystal energy (CE). CE is a trade-able form of energy, a second kind of currency. Like any F2P, there are real money packages available for those who don't find joy in farming endlessly for the perfect gear.

The thing I love about Spiral Knights is just how satisfyingly simplistic it is. Since I started they have implemented many new elements, including an extensive series of missions which you can complete in order to get a kick start on your gear.

And then you can start making your way towards slowly getting every bit of armor in the game: Spiral Knight Armors.

Not only can you get every bit of gear listed (armors, guns, bombs, swords...) There is also an extensive list of costume items. But wait, there's MORE!. You can also get up to three Unique Variants for every bit of gear. So basically, unless you want to chuck out $1000 bucks or so, it will literally take you forever to get half the gear that you aim to get.



In my eyes, the game is endless and a perfect pick up and put down kind of game. There are currently four bosses located in varying parts of the tiers. Each gate has three tiers, every tier offering a different selection of mobs and damage types to challenge you. Along the way, there are also little tidbits that you can choose to take or leave. There are also danger rooms, areas that are considerably more dangerous than the level it lives on. Take it if you want to risk dying. Should you die, you must pay energy to revive. The more you die, the more expensive it gets.

The right gear for the job is essential. A good hand on your shield is as well.

You can download the game straight off steam. Warning! This game contains a lot of cuteness. If you are not the cute, adventuring, dungeon crawling, gear grinding kind of person, you will likely consider this game "boring."

But there will be no other game out there where you can find a ghost cat wearing a monocle and a bow tie. Or a mustachioed jelly cube. Or an angry devilite who is rightfully pissed off that he just got told by his boss to come in on Sunday. Or a love puppy turret that, instead of spitting nasty fireballs of damage, kissed you with lots of healing hearts.

Diablo 3 : Holy shit I have to do this FOUR times?

So just about everyone I know who had grown up playing the crap out of D2 is now playing their own long-anticipated copy of D3. And feelings are 50/50. I will write this without putting too many potential spoilers but if you are really worried I suggest not reading it. Just pretend you liked the post.

So, after years and years of waiting, D3 finally rolled out last week. Diablo 3 was supposed to fill in the dungeon crawler gap in many of our game collections, a constant source of dungeon crawling satisfaction at our fingertips for the next decade of our lives ('sup D2). My copy arrived that evening and I immediately created my favorite class from D2: the barbarian. Along with my companion, a wizard nostalgic for the powers of the sorceress from D2, we began our adventures. We finished the game on Normal difficulty in two nights. But, I didn't want to judge too early, least I make myself look like an ass. So we carried on, through nightmare, and into hell difficulty. And last night I threw in the towel in disgust.

---

1. The difficulty scaling
I still cannot believe we waltzed through normal difficulty in two nights. That included fiddling around with the gem and crafting systems, making tea, and ranting about the game along the way. It was so unbelievably easy that I can count on one hand how many times I died if I excluded all the cheap deaths from fighting Belial (who didn't even have a chance in Nightmare difficulty because he's such a gimmicky fight). I can understand having an easy difficulty setting for those why may be new to a game like Diablo. But I have not heard a single person so far tell me normal was challenging to them in any way. Everyone flew through it, along with the storyline. For me, this significantly diminished the story. We moved on to Nightmare mode and my death rate multiplied ten-fold. It baffles the mind how they could curve the difficulty like this. And no amount of gear in Normal difficulty was going to save me. Thanks to some helpful friends, I was actually slowly kitted up to sustain the large difference in difficulty. And then we went to hell. I died more times in one fight with mini-bosses than I did in the entire first difficulty! The problem, as always, is gear. No gear that I have looted on my travels to this point could save me. Auction house to the rescue! It's either that, or run Act 1 in Hell over and over and over in hopes of better gear. Why is it this way? How is it so hard, in a game that is apparently completely gear dependent, to loot a single good chest armor so a barbarian that can sustain at least a few hits before toppling over? I have not even stepped foot into Inferno. But from what I have heard and seen, Inferno difficulty will be nearly impossible solo and disgustingly over the top even in a team.

2. This is my barb. There are many, many, many like it. But this one is mine. I guess.
At the base (without gear) every single character out there is exactly the same. Don't give me that crap about how-you-play-it. That's not what I am talking about. I'm referring to the sad fact that Blizzard took away our stats and our skill trees. Attempting to usher in a new era in dungeon crawling (I suppose?), they created a glorified MOBA character building system. As you level, you unlock skills and runes. You can choose 6 skills to use in total. There is no "leveling" these skills. Instead, you unlock runes that alter their functions. Beyond your :individual: choice in skills, your gear is all you have. The only difference between your barb and that stranger's barb, is gear. The feeling that you can build a character that's somewhat tailored to your own play style is pretty much out the window.

3. Elective mode
Why does this even exist? I went through normal and half of nightmare without knowing this mode existed, which only mattered to me because it allowed me to pick two skills from a skill set instead of being forced to pick one out of each, even the shitty skill sets. Why would anyone ever NOT want this flexibility? What was the purpose?!

4. Blue is the new yellow
I'm glad I was not alone in noticing this. The topic has surfaced on D3 forums that apparently magical (blue) items are now better than rares. For a game that is so dependent on gear, this confuses me. There's nothing more disappointing than spending that few seconds charging up your identifying powers only to find the same item type of similar level is three times worse than your current blue gear. I can understand if some gear would be worse, but it seems that almost all dropped yellow gear will be outclassed by a blue and it makes no sense.

5. Frozen Waller Vortex Jailer
Holy shit, hold on a second. Now I understand that as we get higher up in difficulty, bosses need to be tougher. But it genuinely looks like Blizzard just allows bosses to grab modifiers out of a bag randomly with no thought to potentially extreme combinations. This leads to an unfortunate number of insta-deaths where kiting doesn't even play a part. In Nightmare difficulty 90% of my deaths were pretty much cheap instakills where I get stuck in that one situation where there is no escape from the punishing damage. In hell I'm just getting the shit kicked out of me regardless of what I'm fighting.

6. I shouldn't have to use the AH to win this damn game
But I have to. The gear that drops is so pathetic that you just have to go to the AH. And, with Blizzard's stunning AH uptime record, when the AH goes down there's pretty much no hope of progressing. In fact, that's where I am at RIGHT NOW. The AH finally shut down after the flood of complaints about gold and items being eaten up by an obviously broken AH system. And, disturbingly, somewhere on the forums (which is currently filled with misery, disappointment and anger), Blizzard "clarified" that "obviously" the existence of the auction house will impact item drops world wide. Essentially, what others loot will affect you, whether you like it or not. The same item isn't meant to exist 1000s of times. But what if I don't want to use the auction house to win this damn game!?

7. The story is juvenile
The story felt uninteresting and overly dramatic when truly not a whole lot was going on. At many points I felt like I was playing D2 with some new graphics and names overlaid on top. It felt stale, they took way too many things from D2 and adopted them unimaginatively for D3. There was a ton of fluff content to buffer between the three bosses you actually get to fight. I felt nothing for any of the characters. Even what little love I might have felt in some remote corner of my heart for Cain wasn't enough to make me care about the story. The mini bosses were uninteresting and not intimidating at all. There was too much whining and not enough oh-shit. The story is very much PG and a lot of old faces resurface but never in any ways that drew much of a reaction for me. Bosses just felt like annoyances that stalked you through your adventures only to meet you at the end, get trampled faster than any other group of mini bosses that came before it, and never to be seen again because...

8. Bosses don't drop shit
Blizzard took away the one thing that got tons of people playing D2 over and over and over. They killed boss runs. From Blizzards mouth, boss runs are not meant to be repeated. They want us to "explore the world" and kill the mini bosses and unique mobs along the way for our gear. Instead, after your first run through killing bosses on Normal difficulty, they never drop well ever again. I have not looted a single rare from a boss since finishing Normal difficulty. Instead, to farm gear, I will be required to randomly pick acts to replay and hope for good drops from mini bosses that may or may not be there.

9. Melee take it up the ass
The entire point about me playing the barbarian class is that I have historically gone for tanky, up close and personal characters in almost every game I play. It is my preferred role. Yet, here I am, running away like a huge sissy because there is no gear out there that I have looted or seen on auction that will allow me to properly balance my vitality, resistances, and damage. The current damage level I deal (which I feel is reasonable and to lose more of it would be absurd, I'm a barbarian ffs) with my current gear doesn't come with any vitality or resistances. As a result, I take a brave barbaric leap into instant death.

10. Falling asleep while playing
With loot drops (one of my biggest reasons to even own D3) being generally atrocious and Hell mode taking one night per act instead of normal's one night for two acts, I'm actually falling asleep trying to hack my way into Inferno. The only thing holding me back is my gear. If I could just buy my gear, I could just skip over Hell and go into Inferno. I find that to be a huge issue and that going through anything between Normal to Inferno is just a cushion to pad the playable hours of the game without any real necessity according to D3 game mechanics. Sure, I need to level up to unlock the same skills every single barb unlocks, but I can do that farming any level.

11. Act 4 isn't an act, its a finale
Not much explanation needed there. The entire storyline already feels like a thrown together idea. Act 4 felt like the act they needed to add in, but they ran out of content and ideas so they just threw some random meaningless quests at you that almost resemble a some very sub par mmo quests, in order to pad the act so it could possibly pass as a full act before the final boss fights.

12. Game is insecure, AH is unstable, exploits aren't addressed
Blizzard is fighting pirating the good old fashioned way. Force players to log in to play. For a game that forces you to rely on their servers constantly, they are not handling the load well. Let's not go into the launch day fiasco. But even now, the lag is terrible, I'm rubber banding at the worst times and the amount of complaints piling up about AH failures, hacked accounts and game destroying exploits is just embarrassing for a company of Blizzards age, experience, and fan base.

13. Glorified gambling and an extremely expensive Horadric Cube
D3 introduced a crafting system which essentially acts like a sick money sink in order for players to loot items without having to get carpal tunnel. The money sink aspect is great. But the unclear value of crafting over looting isn't. To make it worse, the game introduced an auction house. The items crafted would need to be of such high quality in order to compete on the market that it simply isn't viable.
The gem crunching is extraordinarily expensive. But, since gems are the only remaining socket-able items in D3, if you wanted higher gems, you had to do it. Every level costs more and more, and requires some level of jewel crafting commodities. To turn three level 13 gems into one level 14 gem will cost you a cool 400,000 gold. This excludes all costs from level 1-13. The thing Blizzard did do to save us all, though, was allow players to pay to remove their gems from items. Just remember, if you're going to crunch the item anyway, don't pay to remove the gems, they pop out anyway.

I'm sure there are other points I have brought up over the week. But the tl:dr is this. We're still only a week and a half after lunch date and I am already disenchanted with the game and back to playing LoL. I'm heartbroken, to be honest. I looked forward to D3 to be a big brother to D2 but I find myself missing the days of D2, attributes, skill trees, rares, uniques and sets that actually made me jump for joy when they dropped.

Too Many Games

For a while now, we have been playing almost exclusively League of Legends as a group. Mostly on my own I have spent a considerable amount of time on Minecraft as well, and occasionally dabbling in a handful of other games (coughEntropiacough) just to occupy my time.

We are now comfortably in Q2 of the 2012 gaming season and I find myself in a rather alarming situation. I don't know which games to play.

Vindictus : There was always an opening on my list for an MMO that wasn't going to be a mind numbing grindfest where my character stands amongst fields of mobs casting lightning bolt over and over and over and over. Vindictus looks like it might actually be a winner. My experience with Nexon started with QuizQuiz which led me to one of my most memorable games, Shattered Galaxy. Sadly, the game lost the support it needed but I felt it truly had potential. That aside, Vindictus is actually a fun MMO with surprisingly engaging combat, a somewhat decent mission storyline (I've seen some very terrible mission stories in my time) and a pretty fun AFK activity. For those who know me, I often like to AFK play my games. Meaning I like games I can have running in the background that I don't have to interact with constantly. In Vindictus, I can sit myself on a boat and catch fish. I know it sounds pretty bland but it has totally won me over in contest for what game I will have running in the background all the time. When I'm not afking the game, I'm running a mission, landing smooth combos on enemies' heads and doing slow motion killing blows on bosses. There's something very satisfying about smashing heads in with large pillars...

D3 : We all know D3 is coming ( holy sh!t finally ). It's almost a no brainer, I'm going to get the game. If D3 has anything similar to the replay value I found in D2, I am going to be playing that game quite a bit. I remember playing D2 for entire afternoons at a time and I suspect D3 will be no different, if not worse.

Guild Wars 2 : I actually don't know a thing about Guild Wars 2. But, during some contemplation on what games are up and coming, this title was brought up as something expected for Q2/Q3 and there was a good bit of interest in the :customization: (you guys are so lame). I can almost see this as something I will end up attempting to play (if it's not subscription based) if everyone else in The Crew ends up getting sucked into.

Natural Selection 2 : I only recently saw Natural Selection in action. I have never played Half Life and was sadly never gifted it or given the game as part of some package or another. I have not played Natural Selection personally, but have found it engaging to watch. NS is a mod off of Half Life. However, NS2 intends to be standalone, a game on it's own. You can play in the closed beta now if you preorder the game for $35, which is reasonable. However, the game is multplayer and therefore pointless to dive into without a few friends. I am tempted to be the guinea pig, though, and purchase the game in its working state so I can get a feel for its potential.

Prototype/Prototype 2 : Prototype 2 is getting a bit of a voice in the back of my head. I remember playing Prototype briefly and remember enjoying the fluidity of the game, despite its repetition which resulted in my short attention span. Regardless, I need to keep to the tradition of buying and starting games I can never finish, and Prototype is a pretty good candidate to fill this role.

ME/ME2/ME3 : Fighting Prototype for game-to-be-left-unfinished-of-the-year is, of course, Mass Effect 3. Though I have heard it disappointed some, I have always heard the prequels were quality stuff and that it was senseless for me to own both ME and ME3 and haven't ever installed nor played them. I just have very limited attention span for single player games, I suppose.

Resident Evil 6 : Okay, so I only entered the Resident Evil scene in Resident Evil 5. But holy cow me and my zombie slaughtering co-op partner played the SH!T out of that thing. We logged countless hours on the game and it was more than worth the money. Frankly, any game that touts a co-op mode gets at least a bit of attention from me. Thankfully there is still several months before I have to worry about making time for RE6, but I can see myself still playing D3...

Shark Attack!

I has been a long while since I posted some content on this here blog about what has been on my gaming agenda. All personal life stuff aside, I've been hard at work on Minecraft amassing fame and fortune. Okay, so many not fame and fortune, but I do have a rather large protected region in my name on Exiled Gaming that I have been toying around with. On occasion, some friend have joined in. Still plenty of space to be occupied in the region though. I got this massive region for all of us, so get to it, chop chop!

I finally got around to making a clip of some of the construction:




The entire region was born from the badger idea. Though the badger still doesn't have some of the body I was hoping and planning to work on, at least the badger head is there. The interior lies behind the badger head.

The shark was my second idea for something to do with the large body of water that was part of my protected region. As it progressed, it turned into a large oval interior that I think will make a good arena for some good old fashion brawling. Now all I have to do is save enough money to purchase a stargate for the contestants waiting area.

When I'm not messing around in my region building death traps and animal heads, I have been running the server mall. Exiled Gaming has a functioning server mall that can hold up to approximately 250 player owned stores at max capacity. We're at about a third of that right now. Players rent their own shop space. And in my entire three months of running the place, I would say the biggest lesson I have learned is that people can't read. Not because they are illiterate, but because they are lazy and expect all the information to be handed to them.

No wonder so many people fall for fine print. If I made the rent at the mall increase by 10% every week, I wonder how many would notice?

Hmm....

PS: I may make a short clip of the server mall at some point. For now, enjoy the badger cave!

I have neglected you.

I want to apologize for being terrible at not posting on this blog. The truth is I have been engrossed in my own little private world lately, and have not given this blog the attention it deserves. I will make a proper post to it in the near future. Part of this will be to go over where I've been over the past month or so (coughminecraftcough), and the feeling that my return to Eve may very well be right around the corner.

I have had some great memories in Eve. Despite the drama and political bullshit that crept up on us, the truth is there are just some memories that I will remember very fondly for as long as my memory is in tact. There were some great players, many who have left since my joining Merciless., but they have all left me with some good memories.

Looking back on some videos and some killmails, I remember the joy and the adrenaline rush of a :good fight:. Not camping bullshit. Not bear raping. Proper, balls deep pvp. Regardless of who I am with or against, we all create these memories for ourselves and that is the beauty of it. I may not be FC material, but give me a good FC and I will follow them to death and beyond.

I know that, towards the end of our long spring to summer seasons last year, I was like fuel on the political fire. I was extremely devoted to the Merciless. vision to a point where I was even less resilient than the founder. Many who shared the vision had already left (correction: abandoned) and I was unwilling to put up with general bullshit. Behind the scenes, I was the bitching stone from all sides, trying to keep the morale of those most important to me high, failing often, and disappointed in my lack of impact on the same people who impacted me.

There was no way I would not burn out. The game itself did not burn me out. The people did. The disappointments, the leavers, the quitters, the backstabbers. The quitters cut into me the most, the people who shared visions with you who would turn and walk away. Listening to badmouthing and holding my tongue, knowing both sides of the story, knowing more than I should at times, I guess. It was a hard position to be in and my own value to the alliance disintegrated. I felt powerless to hold people together and felt that my presense or absence would have no difference.

So, when the only person I felt I could help was preparing to depart, I did as well. There was nothing left that I could do, my mind was melted and I felt a stranger to most of the alliance.

There is more to be said, but none of it worth saying now. The only thing that matters is it has been over four months since I said I was leaving. Some things have changed, some have stayed the same. The one thing that has stayed the same is how proud I feel every time I watch videos such as the one below (I did not make this one, credit to that goes to Daypitoum, thank you! 07).



 This has been a rolling, ranting, dramatic post, but it only scratches the surface of how I felt most of the time.

tl;dr

Eve, I think I almost miss you. Merciless. I definitely miss you. Garst, get a working internets prz. Give me a good fight, I'll give you my laserz. Or projectiles. Or missiles...

I got banned!

For those who do not know, I have recently(ish) gotten pretty into Minecraft and have been spending a lot of time on it. I enjoy the sandboxyness(yes, that is a word okay...) of it. Over the past two weeks, I've been searching for a well run, buzzing multi-player server populated by (mostly) mature adults who are capable of displaying even a morsel of etiquette to strangers.

So I joined the server owned by Exiled Gaming. At first glance, I liked what I saw. They had some stable mods running and a buzzing community. The website was detailed and helpful. I spent a bit of time browsing over the rules to make sure there wasn't anything that would hinder what kind of game play I and my friends would like. Mostly assured, I logged into the server and began the polite but insistent procedure of injecting myself into an admin's attention.

Shortly, I was offered a plot and began to build. During this time, I watched the chat to get some idea of what the community was like and how the server economy and maturity was. Everything seemed on the level. Over the course of the next two days, I invited 5 friends to join me in the lovely town of Redstone, where we worked to "keep it western." We are the foundation of this town, as it was mostly uninhabited when I first started building there.

Other than a few incidents (getting my chicken farm /butchered every day, getting blown up by TNT randomly, being PvPed and then outsmarting those same pvper's and getting my diamonds back...), I have not been disappointed and have enjoyed my time.

Today, I checked the website again, as I have every day, to see if the donation page was still down. I wanted to contribute because I know running something like this takes time, work, money and blood and tears. The page was still down.

MasterKnives(MK for short) is one of three listed server owners. I jokingly said to MK, "The donation page is still down." The response I got? "No shit!"

Wow... isn't that pleasant.

Now let me back up a bit. I have had no trouble with any of the staff other than MK. Ever since I first heard MK speak, I disliked them for their abusive attitude towards everyone. Everything that came out of their mouth was insulting, down to lines such as, "Some of your parents should have had abortions." I disliked them with a passion, but was also smart enough to know they ran the show (in part) and so mostly kept my interactions limited and tried to ignore the onslaught of verbal abuse this player dealt out constantly to likely 15 year old kids.

Tonight, though, after being offended myself with this rude response to my subtle way of saying, "Hey, I like what you guys are doing and want to show my appreciation," I was less inclined to just bend over and let this stanger slap me around like I'm one to be bullied.

A short while after the initial lines the following dialogue summary occurred. I am now pasting what is my ban appeal ticket, all grammar issues included! It's authentic!

------------------------------------------------------------

MasterKnives and staff,

The following (not to the exact letter, but accurate nonetheless) conversation lines occurred tonight.

Me: the chat does suck (referring to the Mine craft base chat UI)
MK: (I can not remember the exact wording, but MK informed me there was a mod for that, and there was a website used to find mods, called Google)
Me: You're sarcasm and constant over reacting to everything is getting old.
MK: Your. You're is a contraction of you and are
Me: (apologized for typing fail)
MK: Spelling has nothing to do with typing skills.
Me: (and here's the ban line) It's called muscle reflex, if you don't know what it is, try google.com.


This server is a good one, and I have found potential enough with it that I have invited five other friends (with a few more on the way) to join. We are searching for a mature environment and would like to give this server a chance. I never join a server asking for a babysitter, nor do any of my friends. We are all old enough to think for ourselves and appreciate knowledge and sharing. However I do not appreciate the constant verbal abuse that is being spewed out. The concept of mutual respect was completely absent during this entire conversation. I started a neutral line of a discussion and was delivered a condescending response and an knee-jerk ban.

As the payer for the server and one to be looked up to, I did not expect these kinds of over reactions. With a simple retort and no direct violation of any rules, I skipped three levels of ban punishment for defending myself in an offensive and pointless little back and fourth over something so miniscule that I feel like the players on this server are there to be subject to verbal abuse for any small thing at any point MK is logged in.

I have not had any trouble with any other staff. I find, in general, everyone is very friendly, and they carry the weight for making me put in the time and effort for this appeal. I have 5 friends who look to me for the next move and I can not help them or give them ideas when I get banned for refusing to deal with being someone's punch bag on my hours off. I don't get paid for that either.

This entire line of conversation began when I jokingly mentioned that the donation page was still down. I asked about the donation page the first day I was here. I liked what I saw and wanted to contribute, but all this nonsense makes its impossible to tell if it's even valued.

 ------------------------------------------------------------

The server rules state that you are not promised any rights. When I read this, I understood that it could mean the staff may at any time do anything such as wipe the map, the assets, your money, your town, your city, etc. You play on the server to have fun and don't technically have "ownership." All this was understandable to me. However, running/paying for a server does not give you the right to transcend the golden rule.

Just sayin'.

Inb4 I never get a response, and if it's a 48 hour ban, I'll never get a response before the time is over.


---------------
Edit (Dec 14th, 2011) - For those I have not spoken with since this post, I was unbanned the following day after a half-hearted attempt to slap me on the wrist. Whatever, it got me back in but MK still wanted to get a few sly google.com jokes in on me which I was more than happy to play along with.

After some idle conversation, MK gave me a tour of some old structures he had worked on in the past. Admittedly, these structures were impressive. His projects seem in line with something I know some of you guys have heard me say maybe one too many times, "Go big, or go home!" I have to say, I have not considered building on such a large scale, but yes, they were some very ambitious and successful projects. He's still as ass. But I can respect someone who speaks with that kind of creative passion.

I still get to wear a :smugface: however, as I was given, much to my surprise, an apology for my ban. I'm almost ready to sweep this under the bridge, but I think several more google.com joke are still required. And he's still an ass.

I'm... Dragonborn!

I know I have not been posting. It's been weeks! I'm sorry! It's just... but... I'm dragonborn! And the taste of dragon souls is just delicious. Even if a bear decides to charge me while I'm happily sucking up a dragon soul and mauls me in my low HP state.

Skyrim is the first of the Elder Scrolls series that I've had the pleasure to play. The game is fantastic. I'm level (EDIT!) 17 and have begun to avoid the main story line quest. There is so much to explore, so much to collect and create. It fulfills all the things I would like in a single player RPG: slaughtering things, constant ego stroking, making things, hoarding things, and shouting things to death. I always respected the power of voice, so how much cooler can it get? Not much!

I promise I will not put any spoilers in this post. My fellow Skyrim addicts know I've been pretty bitchy and whiny about spoilers. I made my own channel that I could hide in when folks would start talking about the game, even about the equipment they find. Technically, that is not a spoiler, but lalalalalaaaa I just don't wanna know alalalalalalalaaaa...

The game is (almost)endless. Just the perks section is this circle of possible main categories, and each category then has an entire tree of its own, unlocked by category level and also by getting the preceding perks of that tree. You can find perk details here on a wiki page, if you want to see the perks and haven't got the game yourself. While you're leveling up, there is a main mission tree, but also tons, absolute TONS, of side quests, misc missions, locations to explore on the map, respawning dungeons and things to kill and destroy. Everywhere you go, you can pick up respawning ingredients to brew pots, hunt for food and materials to craft gear. You can explore endlessly, and I'm sure that was the intent.

NPC interactions are generally a bit predictable, but I have had some VERY pleasant surprises. During one mission (not going to say which or what), you enter the rendezvous point and overhear your mission giver talking to some others about you. While the other are yakking on about how they predict you'll be complete crap and never make it to the rendezvous, he turns around and basically says, "Oh yeah? Well look what we have here!" I know its programmed for when you enter, but its a great touch and immersion points are deserved. Plus, see my previous mention of ego stroking. The game basically strokes your ego the entire time and we all need that from time to time! (Is it sad that it makes me happy to be awesome and envied and respected in a game? I mean... I'm dragonborn! I deserve it!)

On the PC, the game is just stunning. I am able to run it on ultra with the crossfire enabled, but I do still get frame freezes if I try to give myself whiplash. I have not seen it on console, but my prediction is it just is not going to look as good. If you have a console, feel free to send me some screenshot links to prove me wrong, but I really just can not see how it can be matched. Anyway, did I mention the game is stunning? Facial features are ridiculously smooth, the stuff that doesn't matter are gracefully lower quality so your eyes can focus on the stuff that you can actually interact with. I love that! Instead of making it extremely obvious 'outline-it-in-neon-and-make-it-glow', the game gives more focus to elements you can interact with. Immersion +1point. Salmon jump over the crests of waterfalls, which was a sweet thing I noticed that actually caught my attention. How detailed is that!? I spent a good minute just watching these salmon swimming and leaping against the current.

Finding missions isn't really difficult. You can expect to be able to pick up at least a couple of missions from any npc location you go to. I have a hefty stack of side quests already and I haven't really been actively trying to pick them all up. This is probably the most mechanical part of the game, you can walk up to the npc equivalents of every town and expect to get missions from them. Some people will walk past you and complain about this or that, and if you really want to, you can stop and talk to them. Though some just want more alcohol. Typical.

I haven't really gotten that far (I'm level (EDIT)17 still!) so I'm sure I will encounter plenty of new things to slap around, or get slapped about by, soon enough. So far, the combat has been generally challenging. I've died plenty of times and had to run from a good few fights in the beginning. The sneak mechanic is a very cool and lets you gauge how alerted the enemy is to your presence. You can expect to find the usual encounter mechanics, aka, enter a large open room, step forward, and trigger things that want to axe you. See a room of goodies, walk forward, and get slammed in the face by a grid of spikes. That sort of thing. A few bosses I have encountered have probably been above my level, skill level and player capabilities, but I've been able to cheat the game a bit and get myself into difficult/impossible to get to positions in order to poke them to death with arrows. To date, my record is 112 arrows for one boss. No, there really was no other way for me to kill him.

You get your own house(s). You can even get it decorated for you and there is so much storage space! The bookshelves don't store a ton of books, but of the books you can store, it arranges them on the shelf for you. But I've still dozens of books that sit in a chest somewhere. I collect them for when I'm bored and want to read the contents. Some of the books actually can be helpful (and long winded) tips for your in game encounters. My only complaint about the house is its pretty much impossible to decorate it yourself without the contents of your home flinging themselves in random directions every time you turn around. I can't count how many times I've put that jumpy bit of seared slaughterfish back on that kitchen plate. I'm not eating that.

Obligatory summary on my play style. I have not been planning my perks or really picking anything in particular to skill in. I assign points in whatever I enjoy using and choose perks from point to point. I might regret it in the end if I'm not powerful enough, but I'm not worried about that until it happens! My perks usually go into conjuration, restoration and destruction. My combat begins with conjuration and maybe a bit of destruction if the fight is particularly tough. Otherwise I run around macing everything. Generally on a boss/dragon fight, I will lay down an atronach, put a few poisoned arrows into my target if I have the chance to, charge up to it while it is (hopefully) distracted with my atronach and give it dual poisoned maces to the face. Stamina drained, I circle back to using destruction/restoration until I sink my mana, then frantically start sucking down potions/food so I can do it all over again. Typically the end of a dragon fight involves me macing it to death. Of course, this also often ends in the dragon getting a nifty cinematic kill move involving my lifeless body being thrown around in its jaws.

Tomorrow is my last day of work before the Thanksgiving weekend. If I don't manage to clock at least 40 hours on Skyrim during this holiday, I'm going to be sad. EDIT: Opps. Apparently I'm level 17 still. Not 19... Eh...

The Minecraft, it spreads!

This is not a Battlefield 3 post. Sorry! I simply have not been playing that much to have a good amount to say. Unfortunately, not all in our group have been able to get copies of the game due to financial issues. When you're short on money, 60 bucks is a lot to just drop on a game. Hopefully, as the holiday season gets nearer, everyone will be able to get a copy.

This past week I was gifted a copy of Minecraft (yay! thanks!) and have been caught up exploring that. I find it quite fun and think the idea is a great one. My favorite part of the game is the initial survival. Sadly, as you progress in the game, it become less challenging since it is too easy to find food and resources to be able to survive, the creatures are not aggressive enough to pose a problem and even if you die you respawn with full health and food bar. So yes, I do think the game is too "easy." Usually the only ways I'm worried that I might die is getting stalked by a creeper and getting blown to bits before I realize it's there, or falling off a cliff. My biggest disappointment is the limited number of recipes available. For a game such as this, the things you can create are the most important, and looking at the wiki the list just isn't as long as I expect it to be. For all those copies sold, I certainly expect there to be more! Hey, Minecraft devs, make some more creatures and recipes, please!

That said, I absolutely love the idea of a giant sandbox of randomly generated landscape and being given the means to just meddle with it, altering it to fit my taste, building things and coming up with ways to entertain myself and personalize the world. I appreciate that it can go on pretty much forever, as far as your creativity can go. I understand the game isn't centered around being difficult as a survival game but I hope the developers realize that it shouldn't rely so much on the player creativity. The more complex your world becomes, the harder it should be to progress. And when you die you should not respawn with full health and food bar, you should not be able to retrieve all of y our gear and you should not explode into so many XP orbs that you can crash your friend's server. Sorry!

The game is more fun in multiplayer, so we are running a few private servers. It seems like an obvious fact. When you are building a world, it's just good to have some friends around to laugh with and talk about potential projects and things to do. Otherwise it's just you, the rain, and MOOO! and BAAA! and SSSSSSSSS BOOM!

Enough talk... here's a quick tour of my own single player world:



In the first night, I had dug my shelter into the ground and enclosed it. As I explored, I found a fantastic underground cave system and decided that, though it would mean the top level of my home would have to be pretty small, the cave would be great to live above. I reshaped the cave a bit to make the edges smoother and lit it so the archers wouldn't come at me out of the dark. I even have an underground pool! How cool is that? To make my location even sweeter, there was another pool just outside my door. I used that for a small, covered wheat field. I can survive in this sheltered zone indefinitely (too easy, Mojang!)

I also got the idea that I would like to have some farm animals. Though you can't build your own animal farm yet, I did it any way with much pushing and shoving. Now I can hear moo! and baaa! anytime, anyday.

On one of my first days, I got lost in the woods, died, and could not find my way back. I had built a stone pillar about 10 blocks high, but it simply was not enough to see over the trees. So I exchanged the stone pillar for something a bit more visible. I have a terrible sense of direction, everyone knows this. Hopefully, with this tower, I will be able to explore out a bit futher without losing all of my gear, as challenging as that would be. I built a perimeter around the tower that I can shoot out from. Somehow the creeper got in there. First time firing the bow - fail!

I'm more into the multiplayer worlds we have right now. I's sure I'd still run the singleplayer world when no one is around, but I'm actually pondering running a multiplayer world constantly on my old PC....

Anyway...thanks for visiting!

Trick or Riot Point Cards?

Today I braved RL again to acquire myself a sweet Halloween treat: Riot Point cards! I have to admit I feel a bit guilty splashing out money like this, but lets be honest here, these make me so happy! Riot created some cute Halloween themed champion skins (I mentioned them in my previous post). Though none of the featured Halloween champions this year are characters that I regularly love to play, my gut tells me that if I pass up the chance to buy at least some of these skins, I will regret not having them later on. So I said !@%# it and grabbed me a few of these.

One for my super cool bro and two for me!

It's hard to explain why I feel a bit bad about buying these. I don't often chuck out a good sum of cash like this (anymore) to feed my gaming, and I still have to sometimes remind myself that its not bad that I sometimes spend money on what I have fun with. But for some inexplicable reason, dropping 75 dollars on three cards still feels a bit weird. It's not the same feeling as if I were spending 60 dollars on an actual game title. The only similar comparison I can think of is if I were to go to the pool hall on a weekly basis. I can go to a public place and spend money weekly to play and enjoy the whole experience of being out and playing, or I can just buy a table. I may have the table to own, but both routes have their own cost and pros and cons. One route is just a bit more tangible than the other.

I'm not making any sense am I? Don't listen to me! Just look at the RP cards! I'm gonna get me some cool skins now! You jelly?

Taking a day off for Battlefield 3!

So I requested a day off next week Friday in anticipation of the Battlefield 3 launch. After playing Battlefield 2 for quite a long time and then being somewhat disappointed with Battlefield Bad Company, it seems EA has delivered a true successor to Battlefield 2. I am excited! I'm not sure if I'm more excited about the day off, or Battlefield 3. But I am definitely excited about tv guided missiles. I have landed some shots in Battlefield 2 that even I can't help but be a bit proud of (read: I'm so f$!%in awesome!!!!!!!!). I'm sure it will be more fast paced than Battlefield 2, so big hopes that I can keep up. I downloaded the Beta and played it briefly, but the buggy party system was a bit of a turn off. Here's hoping those issues are resolved when we all sit down to play this upcoming weekend. And here's hoping my 1K:12D ratio doesn't last very long. (Doing a lot of hoping over here.)

Still obsessed with LoL, I went to Best Buy yesterday planning to buy more riot cards to pick up a bunch of cute Halloween skins. I couldn't find the cards (why on earth do they split cards up by departments, and then put multiple stands in different parts of each department with different cards?! How is that in ANY way intuitive?!) but on my pass around the games section, I caught a trailer on the TV saying "Blizzard DOTA!" and did a double take. Apparently Blizzard is making a fun little version of DOTA as well. I walked out without continuing my RP card search, unsure of whether this would draw me away from LoL. But after reading up about Blizzards version, I feel it will not quite be in the same competitive ring as LoL or other dedicated MOBA titles. Maybe I should go and get those RP cards...

In the meantime, I made another video, this time without all the talking and the Teamspeak sound. Mostly because I was shouting and swearing a lot and it sounded terrible. Here is a game of Dominion I played with Soraka as my champion. Without any idea what to do about music, I did a search for "unicorn" (get it, Soraka, unicorn, eh? eh?) and "remix." It seemed to work out pretty well so maybe that will be what I will do from now on!

Dear Random Person that Pushed Dislike Within 5 Hours of Me Uploading, While I Was Asleep, 

Why you no like mah video?! I'm ultra-sadface :(((( 

the mangO tourbus is here with Iron Grip: Marauders!

Preface: If anyone knows of some good free or affordable video editing software that I can use for speeding up some gameplay videos, please let me know! Love you long time!

Hello my browser game lovers. I made two videos today because I couldn't be as short and sweet as some might have liked. The videos feature a F2P browser based game called Iron Grip: Marauders. I mentioned it in my first blog post as one of my current toys that I get to play with for free!

The game was featured on Steam a few weeks ago and I'm glad to have it in my arsenal of entertainment. If you sign up via steam before Oct. 30th,2011, you will get some Steam gifts, so don't wait!

This first video will go through some of the browser views for IG:M. Sorry if I talk a little fast but YouTube doesn't give me as much time as I need to say the millions of words I want to say. This one is a bit dry but will give you some tips as you begin your marauding career.

This second video are some clips out of my example raid and includes some narration about my thought process behind my moves.

I hope this helps. If it does not, you can always view some game play by a IG:M vet. These videos helped me learn how to win fights instead of getting trampled by the AI.

If you are interested or need something to occupy your time at work, I recommend giving this one a try. It's free and you can save your raids at any time and come back to them later! You can find me on IG:M as mangOskittle. Write me and let me know where you found me from so I don't ignore you. Thanks for tuning in.

I made a video!

Since I am going to be ranting and raving (mostly just ranting) about games on this here blog, I decided to learn to take some footage and make some simple videos. The first attempt features League of Legends, a F2P (free to play) game we've all been playing pretty obsessively for almost half a year.

Kog Maw, Ashe, Soraka, Kassidin, Cho Gath (GO TEAM!)

vs

Mundo, Vayne, Janna, Kog Maw, Xerath

I messed around with it in Live Movie Maker to cut a 30+ minute game down to 10 mins and added copious amounts of narrations. Some swearing made it in and I suspect that will be the theme for all my videos. So if there are young ears about, I would suggest headphones! At least I did not record my own microphone input otherwise there would have been a lot more.

It took many attempts at saving the video out in varying qualities before I realized that I was using the wrong aspect ratio which was why my video kept turning up squished and distorted. The resolution I snapped the video with is widescreen, so as long as I save it out in wide screen mode, it was surprisingly good at maintaining the working quality.

Hope you enjoy.

I swear excessively when I game.

Before you subject yourself to this long winded blog post that will go on endlessly talking about me, me and me, I want to say thank you. You actually clicked on a link to view this post in the first place which means a great deal to me. I suspect I already know who will be my earliest audience; you know of my previous attempt to start a blog like this. You guys are truly my closest friends and you know who you are!

I'm mangOskittle. I'm a gamer and have been to some extent for most of my life. Over the course of my gaming life, I have used dozens of aliases, but this one has been the flavor of the year. Though I have been gaming for most of my life, I only started to pursue games to my full potential about five years ago when I gained my financial freedom (read: I got a full time job). Since that time, that fabled "IRL" has become more and more mysterious. I love games like some might like reading books or watching movies, listening to music or going hiking or having drinks with good friends. Games help cure my stress after dealing with a bad day. I escape from this bizarre thing called reality by playing games. I socialize with great people while playing games. I also use gaming as an excuse to splurge my hard earned money since I am not nearly as inclined towards other activities like drinking.

So this entire blog is my tribute to games. Here I will share all the juicy (or not so juicy) stories about my past, present, and future gaming career. I cannot guarantee I will cover any enlightening topics from post to post. However, I did write a post in my previous blog about fear in games compared to real life experiences and the element of control. The same topic was covered in GamePro magazine about half a year later, but I had ripped my blog down by then and I could never prove how awesome I was. But I am awesome, really.

I'm sure I will stress about more awesome topics to fill this empty blog with. In the meantime, I will selfishly eat more of your time by talking more about myself. My first gaming experiences were with my family's Nintendo Entertainment System, playing some of my favorite games like Super Mario Brothers, Bomber Man, Penguin Adventure, Joust, Excitebike, and Twin Bee(I loved this one, thank you bro for reminding me of it!!!). When we got the Super Nintendo, the old system was slowly forgotten and replaced by more Mario and Donkey Kong games, as well as some crazy Star Wars games. I can't honestly even remember most games I played. I just remember that my father had gotten big disk boxes full of games (let's not speculate where these came from, yeah?) and we didn't even get through a quarter of all those games!

When my father finally built a PC for me and my brother to use, it won over our consoles easily and soon the Super Nintendo was left to collect dust. Together, my brother and I played all the usual classics like Doom (my father had bought us some silly extras like Doom Barney. We enjoyed killing him under closing doors frequently). Wing Commander was one of my favs, I will never forget how heartbroken I felt when our next PC could no longer run the game properly (it would speed through it like it was on fast forward). Civ2, Mario is Missing!, D/Generation... and of course, Monkey Island!

During our visit to Taiwan in '97, my uncle got me and my brother hooked on Star Craft. Once back in America, we joined my first gaming clan where I was always the total noob that had to be baby sat through most matches. Eventually we moved on to Counterstrike (I'm sure I'm missing games in between).

Around my high school years, I started playing a lot of obscure titles, many alpha/beta tests that eventually didn't survive. But they were free so the price was right. Some names still stick in my memory, like Astonia, which remains F2P to this day. I also remember playing Ragnarok Online during testing phase. Shortly before I had to pretend to be a responsible adult (apply for college), I became an overlord (how the hell did that happen) for Shattered Galaxy Beta. That's just a fancy term for someone who has shout and map tagging rights and can tell people where to go and what to do.

I played Diablo II into my freshman year in college. I probably played it before too, but it's all a bit of a blur. My favorite story from Diablo II that I never get bored of telling was about my level 45 Assassin hardcore character that died to Mephisto on normal difficulty because someone came to visit us in our dorm and I forgot I left her there to tank him. When I got back 45 minutes later, she was a little puddle on the floor and I was doing my best Luke Skywalker impression. Around this time I also need to admit that I contracted a NeoPets addiction. I ended up with over a million NeoPet dollars, or whatever, and a !@#% ton of junk. I can't remember why I got so obsessed with it, but I did. I can neither confirm nor deny that I might have NeoPet McDonald's toys.

Thanks to my bother (thanks a lot bro, sheesh), I got addicted to online poker over the summer after my freshman year (okay, so it's not exactly gaming, but poker has plenty of life lessons, surprisingly). Later on I encountered my gambling addiction, spent whole days playing and losing and playing more and losing, overcoming the illogical gambler mindset and continued on to play poker to this day. Not saying gambling is right or anything, but it's fun to play poker on my phone while falling asleep.

Junior year found me playing another obscure title called Fairyland and also a not so obscure one, City of Heroes. After playing Fairyland obsessively for almost two years (my bf at the time was extremely tolerant, which I can't say for all the gentlemen I have been close to in my past!), on some lucky day, I read on the Fairyland forums that someone was badmouthing this game called Project Entropia where players could make money while playing! Blinded by the marketing that was just too good to be true, I made all of the appropriate sheep bleating noises while downloading the game which would eventually become my new obsession, addiction and my gateway to all the fun I am having now.

I say this because it was in Project Entropia that I met the crew of gamers that I now speak to on TS on a daily basis. When in proximity of my computer I am plugged into TS constantly, where we discuss old, new and upcoming games, play together and in general share and bitch about "IRL" together. Months after meeting these fine folks, I downloaded Eve Online with them. Eve became my longest MMO career to date. If you are familiar with Eve, this will hardly be a shock considering the massive titans floating in the background. Sadly, I am on Eve hiatus for tons of reasons, one big one being that the engaging content that has kept me going year after year has been sorely missing over the past few expansions. 

With my cool gaming crew, I attempted to improve on my shooting skills with games such as Fallout 3, Battlefield 2, Left4Dead, Killing Floor...Though I think the most significant improvement happened when I realize it wasn't that my arm likes to spasm randomly, it was my mouse pad being terrible. That's my excuse.

I have a terrible flaw which is I never seem able to finish games. I still haven't finished Fallout 3, nor Dragon Age: Origins. I do plan to! I can count on one hand how many I have actually completed; Portal, Portal2, Singularity, Resident Evil 5... and that's about it. Oh, and Plants vs. Zombies. That counts, right?!

I feel I should mention I do own SC2. But thanks to someone who I won't name, our SC2 crew was soon sucked into the SOTIS custom map. After months of playing this, I introduced League of Legends into the fold, and we have been (mostly) collectively obsessed with LoL since.

When my muscles aren't atrophying while I play LoL (every muscle except for my mouse clicking muscles), I have been exploring Steam's new F2P games. Currently, I am running Iron Grip: Marauders in the background, where a 3 Shield raid awaits me and I have a strong feeling I am going to lose.

That was my way of saying this is where I should conclude this absurdly long first post. If you have gotten here without skipping everything from the first paragraph on, I just want to say thank you, again. You are an insane @^%!. If you skipped everything, then well @#%!. I don't blame you(but secretly I do, I am disappoint!). If you played a game with me in the past and I forgot to mention it, you are more than welcome to poke my memory! Until next time... I'm off to pillage, raid, smuggle, and plunder!