The Latest Coffee Break

..is not only the name of a game I recently bought, but also how it feels playing New World at the moment.

One thing at the time, and let’s start with the game named No Rest for the Wicked. It’s an top-down ARPG, with a slower pace gameplay than, say, Diablo or Path of Exile. It’s more like an Isometric Souls-like than Diablo-like, from what I can tell. It seems really awesome, despite only being in Early Access. I’ve promised myself to stop buying Early Access games, but when the games in Early Access is only roughly €30, and as polished as this already is, I feel like I can make an exception – especially when it’s so close in combat to Souls-like as it is.

I’ve also bought a few more books for the collection! Over the years, I’ve been collecting some tabletop roleplaying game stuff that I was in contact with as a kid. It’s just me re-buying some of the books I had back in the day, and buying the ones I didnt have – which was most of them.

There’s a few sections of this collection – first off, it’s the miniature models I’ve shown a few times here already. I dont really collect the “old” stuff of these, but I just try to get as much variety as possible – militias, skeletons, monsters, beastmens, etc. Last year, I kickstarter-backed a company making miniatures, and a few weeks ago I got the shipment finally – 400+ minis, almost 15 kilos of it!

Secondly, the publisher of the main tabletop rpg I’m collecting, also published some fantasy books. It was a series of 51 fantasy books, some being Conan the Barbarian books, Gary Gygax’s books about Gord, a few books of Robert Asprin’s Thieves’ World series, and a good chunk of the Elric series – and finally I’ve gotten my hands on the last one. Now I proudly own all of them!

Not only that, there’s quite alot of books and boxes I’m trying to collect, of the actual tabletop RPG itself. There’s four different editions I want to get my hands on, and a total 17 boxes and 42 books – and so far, I’ve gotten 11 of the boxes and 28 of the books – not all of them complete, though. I still miss some items, mostly maps. It’s getting close to being complete! It’s a mix of rules, expansion rule-sets, sourcebooks, bestiaries, adventures and handbooks, and in this case, I’m mostly aiming to get everything from Edition 2, 3 and 4, as well as the “Expert rules”, which was a sort of “expansion” to Edition 2. When 2E first came out, they expanded upon it in lots of ways, with extra rules and such, which came to be known as “Expert”. It was simply just an expansion of the rules. 3E only updated the basic ruleset of 2E, which meant that the Expert-ruleset still functioned with 3E.
When finally Edition 4 came out, they reworked it in its entirety, integrated the “Expert-rules” into the base ruleset. Therefore, basically any “Expert-material” is fully functional with both Edition 2, 3 and 4, and as long as you do some minor conversions between them, all three editions are fully functional with each other, so long as you mind the Expert-rules. Any adventure published for 2E, will absolutely work for 4E, as long as you do minor adjustments and conversions, just as an adventure published for 4E will work with 2E or 3E the same way.
Back in the day, we used to play Edition 4 along with some material from the “Expert”-rules, but the books I had access to myself was the 3rd edition stuff, so with a bit of tweaking, I made 2E and 3E stuff compatible with 4E, and it worked like a charm. I’m definitely not opposed to get the books and boxes from Edition 5 and later – but my main focus is to get everything published between 1982 and 1994, which is the year fifth edition came out.

But 5E is not on my “to get”-list as of now. If they were, it’ll be 15 more books and boxes, however, it was generally regarded as a huge step down in quality from the previous editions, and we just never got around to play with it at all. It was set in a different area of the planet that was the official game-world, and it introduced more races that was vastly different than what we had been used to, and all the rules were apparently made different for the sake of being different. I know that our DM didnt want to deal with it too much, so we kept playing 4E. Me and some friends were actually making our own stuff according to the 4E rulesets for upwards ten years after 5E came out.

The editions that came out even later, we dont talk about, loudly atleast. It was a completely different dev team and publishers – the IP got sold to someone else, who thought they could breathe new life into it. I think they failed, pretty disastrously. That, which was basically trying to lable itself as 6E, 7E and 8E, was published with few addendum-books and few years between the editions, and was set in a completely different world than the first 5 editions. Personally, I consider them a flop, and not actually 6th, 7th or 8th edition of the game. They’re a completely different TTRPG altogether in my opinion.
Several years later, they tried to re-release the game, basically just republishing their own version of the game, to “celebrate” the 30 year aniversary of the original IP – Yes, they bought an IP, remade it in their own vision and set it in a completely different world, and then years later republished their own stuff as a celebration of the IP they bought and vandalized. Some years later even still, they tried to republish the 3E mixed with the Expert rules and 4E. I mean, they published it, so they didnt try – but I dont think it was a huge success, as they later sold the rights to another company, which also made a kickstarter for it.

Their version was more of a continuation of 3E with Expert ruleset. While I – in a way – got disappointed, because I liked 4E more and hoped this version would be more like 4E, I must say that I do like this edition alot more than the “flopped 6E” – so much so, that I actually consider this the true sixth edition of the TTRPG. Atleast it’s set in a world, that for now is implied to be the “original” gameworld, which is a huge win in my book.

Also, as a side-collection, I’m trying to get my hands on the Falcon books too, by Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson. They’re solo-adventure books, basically a book filled with paragraphs that, when read in different orders, make several adventures in one book. It’s a sci-fi setting with a time travelling agency, where you play as one of the agents trying to hunt down criminals – and depending on your dice rolls and choices, you stop reading one page, and start reading a specific paragraph on another page, riffling through the pages back and forth in order to read “your” adventure. There’s six of these books; The Renegade Lord, Mechanon, The Rack of Baal, Lost in Time, The Dying Sun, and At the End of Time. So far, I’ve got the first three books, two of which I grew up with and played alot. They were my older brothers, but I probably spent more time with them than he did, and when I moved out I didn’t bring them with me, as they were not mine. But I made sure to get my own books later – it just took almost twenty years! The first two I got almost a year and a half ago, the third I got now just a few weeks ago. Now I just need to find the last three..

So, what’s happening in New World then? Not much. I still do the same thing as usual, trying to get ingame funds, playing M3’s, waiting for more content so that my old company members come back to the game. There’s not much else to do. I did however sign up for a competition – I dont really know all the details, as of yet, as nothing has been officially announced yet. But from what I’ve gathered so far, AGS is sponsoring a Speedrunning event of one of their latest raids, and they’re apparently working with a known speedrunner of this game.
So from what I understood, they’ve appointed a few content creators to be “team captains”, and over the weekend, there’ll be a 4 day event, where the “team captains” will be running this new raid. Which members of each team is completely up to the respective team captains, and the rumor so far is that for the North American region, two of the best speed running teams will get together and form one 10-man team. Usually, the North American teams are the winners in all other speedrunning events, so everyone is fairly sure they’ll win this too – however, it seems there’s regional competition. NA competes against NA teams, European teams against other European teams, etc., which actually makes this interesting.
How many team captains there’ll be? No idea. Will it actually be a regional lineup, or will it be a global one? No idea. What’s the detailed rules? No idea.

Thing is, AGS havent gone public with this yet. And apparently, they “forgot” about timezones, so their idea was to publish this event of the morning of Friday, for the event to end on Monday – but timezones makes this event go live Saturday for Australians, for instance, and in the evening for Europeans. And I’m not being sarcastic either – I saw a screenshot between the AGS representative and one of the content creators talking about this, and AGS just said “tomorrow morning”, referensing US-time, while seemingly oblivious that it wasnt the same for the one they were talking to. “Tomorrow morning” would be 6h later for the “team captain” at the time of the screenshot, but that was apparently not correct – as said hours came and went a long time ago. It’s like they’re so US-centric, that “the rest of the world” simply dont exist. I’m going to assume that “tomorrow morning” means “US West-coast time”, and that they wont share anything until 9:00 their time.

Which is all and well – except for the fact that it caters more to the US-player base so much more, as it gives them more time to plan and run it, than the other regions. And as the official announcement haven’t been released yet, people like me – who is not a team captain, but merely a possible team member of the running teams – know very little. I have to piece together the information I get from different sources, which means I’m not a hundred percent sure what this is all about; but this is what I’ve pieced together so far.

In roughly two to three hours, AGS will go public with a “weekly, weekend event”, where some – unknown number – content creators take the role of “team captains”, get a team together and try to speedrun the Winter Rune Forge. As I said, NA have the upper hand here, since they just merged two of their best teams into one and going forward with that team, while the rest of the regions team captains have a few players they usually Speedrun with and have to fill up with random players. As such, the other regions team captains have been probing their communities for prospective team members, and some information as to what it’s all about have been “leaked”, just to let these prospective players know roughly what they’re about to sign up for – which is how I know anything at all about this event.

If the information I’ve gathered is correct, each region competes against itself – so in NA there’ll be a few teams that compete against eachother, in Europe there’ll be a few teams competing against eachother, etc,. Each winning team will be rewarded with 20 Azoth Edition gamekeys provided by AGS – meaning each player will get two free gamecopies of the base game including some deluxe skins, no DLC – and that’s it. There’s also a possibility that the competition is global – meaning that every team competes against every other, no regional restriction, and if so, basically everyone I’ve spoken to so far are in agreement that it’s basically the same as saying that the two merged NA-teams will win this entire event. Two professional hardcore speedrunning teams that have won most of the community-driven speedrunning competitions so far over the last year or so, will almost be guaranteed to win over teams that mostly comprise of PUG-players.

However, the details will be announced later. This includes if there’s restrictions, including if there’ll be “PUG’s allowed” or if the teams are supposed to be comprised of the team captains usual team members – how this’ll be enforced I dont know, so therefore I do not think this will be a rule, but it is AGS, so I wouldn’t be surprised. The exact rules, times, if there’ll be a number of attempts, etc., none of these things are yet public.

And as a member of the discord community one of these team captains have, I saw them searching for potential players to play this event with. There was a vetting process – I had to show my gear and have it being approved, and so on, and improve upon any detail I needed to. No problems, I provided my gear that I use for both healing and dps in the Winter Rune Forge and said I was interested in both roles, whichever they needed.

Strangely enough, during the vetting process, I did not hear a single comment about my healing gear specifically. It was said that my gear was fine, with a few tweaks, but the tweaks mentioned was only for my dps gear, and then I was told that I could sign up for the dps role that wielded Greatsword and Hatchet. Great!, I thought, so I signed up and started to get the necessary stuff together.

I crafted a new hatchet; bought a new spear; crafted a new, very expensive Runeglass of Arboreal Opal to re-socket my Greatsword; I upgraded my three Ancient Combat trophies from Basic to Major, which was by far the largest expense; and then I purchased a bunch of the relevant coatings, wards and honing stones. I was spending loads in preparation for this, it was definitely more than I was comfortable with, but it was necessary in order to participate in the speedrun on the level that atleast was required of me. I usually hover around a few thousand golds, but lately I’ve been really grinding to get more funds, like running Elite Chests like crazy to find Golden Scarabs to sell, been running lots of max level mutations to find loot to sell, etc. I’ve slowly but surely managed to get a small fortune – compared to what I usually have – and I have now blown through most of it in preparation for this Winter Rune Forge Speedrun competition.
We’re still waiting for the official announcement from AGS, but in the meantime; a few hours ago, “my” team announced their roster for the evening, which I signed up for.

Edit – As time later passed, the “announcement” AGS said they were going to make, was nothing else but a list of team captains, and times they were supposedly streaming their runs. “My” team captain had a timeslot for three in the middle of the night. Very confused about this, I reached out to some of the people on the list, talked to them a bit, read conversations I saw they had had on Discord and tried to talk to AGS themselves, and I couldnt get a straight answer to anything. Not the rules, not the framework of the event, not if we were supposed to actually speedrun and stream at stated scheduled times, or if it was supposed to be a VOD, or if anyone hosted our VODs somewhere.. the team captain I was supposed to run with simply said that No, they weren’t running at that time, they didnt know why AGS had put them down for that slot, as they had said they were going to run at another time and still AGS put them down for the middle of the night, and that they were going to be asleep at that time.

Nothing against the team captain I was supposed to run for, because I wholeheartedly agree with what was said – but AGS does something like this.. it just confuses me to no end. I dont feel like I can participate in things with no rules or structures like that. And not two team captains told me the same things about how they had been explained how this event was supposed to work.

And AGS themselves? They were very vague about it all, and just referred me back to the “schedule-tweet”, as if that gave all the information necessary. I promise you, it did not explain a damn thing about the rules, structure or framework of anything.

So I stepped down from running, even if I wasnt in the starter-roster for the evening. I just cant do it. I cant run serious speedrunning competitions, at three at night, when I’m a single parent of three kids I need to take care of. Late evening is fine, even if it’s pushing it, but starting speedrunning at 03:00? No way.

So yeah, it’s basically a meme at this point. New World player population is basically driven so far into the ground as possible without having to shut down. They have finally merged the servers, but it was too little, too late. There’s still not alot of content, and that’s even a week after Season 5 actually went live.

Sure, there’s more artifacts, and they integrated the old trials into them. However, with the “pity-system” they also implemented, people played like 15 trials in total and had everything done. They also came up with the 10 man raid – which was reused old content from “soul-trials” from Season 4.

Yes, they took the Story Mode singleplayer trial and upscaled the difficulty to have a reason to make it a 10 man raid. However, I’ve done the raid a whooping 4 times already, and it’s… well.. Too easy. I also managed to get the artifact that came from it, and except for one piece of gear, I have no real reason to ever play it again. It’s already obsolete from “content”-standpoint. That piece of gear is a pair of gloves that comes with a defense perk and a healing buff, “Keen Beacon”, and if I upgrade it, I can put bonus health on it. However, it’s just a “quick way” for me to get a pair of gloves with that perk on it, that is cheaper than to craft it otherwise. Personally, I would like a pair of gloves with Keen Beacon, Health and Enchanted Ward, but crafting those are expensive, and finding a pair with exactly those perks along with the right stat is nigh on impossible. That 10 man raid have the possibility of dropping gloves with the right stat and “Physical Aversion”, which, while a defense-perk, is a worse perk for me than Enchanted Ward. And since I can only get one piece of armor every time I to the 10-man raid and there’s 15 different pieces, and I can only get rewards for doing the 10-man raid two times every week… the odds for me to drop those very gloves are quite bad. I’m honestly better off just farming the materials required and craft them several times over, so that I can put different gems in every pair of glove.

Other than that, what did they do? They came up with native controller support, and the two default layouts are horrible. It’s also not possible to re-map the buttons, which just makes the controller usage very bad. They did make changes to Magnify – a variant of stats that, earlier, just boosted your highest stat with more stats. That was just bad, as you couldn’t balance your stats the way you wanted, but they changed that in Season 5 – now you can choose if you want Magnify to increase your highest stat, or a specific stat.

They also changed gold-cap from 500’000 to 1’000’000, added a target-lock for PvE, stat-respeccing cost cut to 25% of previous cost, and added mounts to OPR (as if I was even playing that game-mode in the first place), and changed the combat code to be more optimized and just overall better – which is all is good things, but not actually any content. We’re talking about QoL-changes – Quality of Life-changes. And they also changed cooking. They presented it as an “overhaul”, and sure, they did cut down on the amount of recipes available – instead of having, say, four recipes for Strength and Dexterity food, one that gave Strength only, one that gave Dexterity only, and one that gave both stats in various split, they now only have two – one that only gives Dexterity and one that only gives Strength. And honestly, I can not really tell if that’s good or not, as the magnify-changes happened at the same time. But what I can tell, is that I’m very annoyed by the fact that they now require more amount of ingredients to be able to craft at all.

Before, you could spend your ingredients to craft a determined amount of portions, and you could chose that amount of portions. If you only had enough ingredients for 11 portions, you could do all those 11 portions – and if you had the gear and trophies and buffs for it, you could get more portions out of those as a bonus. But now? You need to have the ingredients enough to craft three portions for every “craft” you make, so you can’t make only one, or only two, you have to make sure you get enough ingredients for three. Sure, you probably wanted to craft alot in one go anyway, and not just one or two. But having to craft in increments of three is dumb, to be frank. You can’t craft four portions, you have to craft six. You can’t craft 50 – you have to make sure you have ingredients for 51, etc. That’s just inconvenient though, I’ve got to admit, and not a gamebreaking thing. But for a patch that introduces a bunch of improvements, QoL-stuff, it sure is weird that they implement a nerfed and inconvenient cooking, which was something they wanted to try to make players engage with more. It’s like, “We want players to cook more, how do we do that? Right, we make cooking annoying and inconvenient!” The dumbest was that they also tried to introduce that you needed five times the amount per craft, but only get three portions out of those five-timed increased amount. Yes, they tried to make you use five times the ingredients, and only get three portions out of it. This was a “QoL” they tried to make more players engage with cooking with. And this is not mentioning that they nerfed the stats of food from +48 to +44, and then introduced a +48 stat food that required fishing. Granted, if you want +48 constitution food, you’ll need sumptuous rabbit, which isn’t fishing – but all other stats you needed legendary fish. And the droprate for those legendary fishes are made lower and to even get it you need to get expensive fishing gear and.. it’s a mess. There’s a reason so few players fish, and what they’ve done now is basically just incentivized more fishing-bots. It’s straight up a mess, all of it.

But yeah, the player population have taken a nose-dive. As you can see, the numbers are pretty bad.

Granted, the season came out 2nd of April, and the graph “only” shows from mid-day on the 4th. But the first two days weren’t that much better. Last post I did, back in March, showed a 30-day peak of 16’851 players. Today, that 30-day peak is 14’210. And that is including the Season 5 release – and a week into Season 5, the 24-hour peak is 10’159. That’s world-wide. Over five server-regions (US-West, US-East, South Asia-East, EU-Central, Asia Pacific-South East), and twelve servers in total, and we peaked with just 10’159 players the last day. That should probably tell you how screwed this game is, when we had 77’000 last October – granted, it was the Expansion at that time – or almost 138’000 players November the year before – granted, that was Brimstone patch. But going from 138’000 players down to a low of 20’000 players, to rise to 77’000 players and slowly going down to 20-30’000 players… compared to now, when Season 5 have a max of 14’210. It’s laughable. Another laughable thing is that they couldn’t even decide what they wanted to call the Season. They’ve got two different names for the Season 5;

Both of them are referring to Season 5 – that’s the actual names they’ve given it.

It was actually fun the other day though, we got a bunch of the company back together to try out the 10-man raid, so atleast something positive came out of it. And I guess I’m being unfair, it’s not really as if the Winter Rune Forge was bad – it was just disappointing that it was reused, upscaled old content, but it’s still good. Unfortunately, Andicus couldn’t join in as he hasn’t bought the DLC yet, so he haven’t levelled beyond level 60, and it was mostly he that was the reason we got together to try it. But he was still with us in a call, watching Napkins stream of it. Me, Napkin, Fleur, Obed, Ansved, Arto and Jimm1n went in, and we had a great time. We got someone more, a friend of Jimm1n’s, and two random players from the global chat, so we got a full raid group atleast. And it was great to hang out and play with everyone again. Sadly, Jefery, Hell and Bogdan wasn’t able to join in, which would’ve been fun.

Meanwhile, since everyone have been away from the game, playing other things, working alot or having taken a break for family reasons or school, etc., I’ve been trying to find other people to play with. I’ve been making friends with people, shocking as it is! I’ve mostly been playing with Sakis, but I’ve also been playing alot with Shake, Deniz, AwhyJ, Muse, and Kulzac – who actually is in my company.. I’ve also played some with EfeAlanbel, Wolfstein, Valairon in PUGs. I’ve even played a bit with R2pp2r, FCDoomsday, Hrodgir and Baggins over the last few months. Although, Baggins and me wasn’t necessarily playing with eachother, I guess – we were playing “next to each other”, so to speak. We accidentally did the same open world-content, helping each other out a bit.

I’ve had fun, still. It’s not the same as playing with the company – I miss playing with them, to be completely honest. But considering the state of the game, I do not blame them from not logging on. New World is basically a game of waiting at the moment. The “roadmap” for New World will be presented in June apparently, which is where we will know what to expect for the rest of the year.

As Sakis, I believe it was, so neatly put it, the devs have basically said that we are to piss off until June, when they will ask us to piss off for a couple of more months until they actually gives us any content.
The issue with that, is that as we do not have any information about what the announcement in June is, it might very well be something along the lines with “We’re releasing on console in August!” and that’ll be all. So what the announcement and roadmap in June will be… it might even be “piss off until June, at which point we will tell you to piss off for an entire year while we launch on consoles and learn how to code for that too!”

Sad is what it is.

..it has been now. Just a little bit more than three months. I didnt get that much time to play DDDA, after all, but it’s still installed. But I am actually more looking forward to the next game, Dragon’s Dogma 2, that will launch in just a few days. 22nd of March, I’ll head off to Gransys once again.
…kinda. This weekend is my weekend with the kids, so I wont be able to play too much, but a few hours during the evenings I should be able to! Provided I’ll get the PS5 for myself, that is – all three of my kids have decided to put their paws on it, all of them playing their own favorite games. I almost wish I have a second PS5, just so they dont have to share as much, but then I need another monitor and it’ll all cost way to much.

So, what’s been happening lately? Well, my “slow-play December” went on for a few days into January, and when I came back to New World, basically half the player population decided to take a long vacation from New World, including my company. I do not blame them – the game is basically put on a shelf by the devs, and the “content” the devs provided with Season 4 wasnt all that much to hang on a christmas tree. Couple that with the fact that the devs straight up told us that we’re not going to see much until summer, when we can see their roadmap – not “get more content”, but legitimately “see their roadmap”.
Like, this summer they’ll share their plans for the future. They most likely are not going to have content by then; a roadmap is a plan for upcoming content. And so, the players was left with very little content, that seemed poorly planned ahead – such as the fact that everyone was basically “enough-geared” before a week had gone by – and now they have nothing to look forward to either. And any bugs or balance-fixes was supposed to come with Season 5 – which inexplicably got delayed. No word on why, and no word on the new release date. What we did get word of though, was that it was apparently “cool stuff!” coming on the roadmap. So..
Dead game? Probably.

No, to be more real, though, I do believe they’ll keep New World alive for a good while more. They’ll keep the servers up and running, and even make a console release – they’ve recently added controller support, which was supposed to come with Season 5 – and through console release they’ll get an infusion of both cash and players. That is what I believe.
What I hope as well, is that said console release will have shared servers across all platforms. I also wish for it to be cross save – so that I can play on my characters on PC, and boot up my PS5 and log in there and play with the very same characters. It is, after all, a fairly new tech, FF14 had it working three years ago or something? Baldurs Gate 3 have it too, as do Diablo 4, and it’s been added to other games after their release, such as Witcher 3, for instance.
But just beause it’s a few years old tech and that a few other games offer it, unfortunately does not mean that New World will offer either cross platform play, or cross save.
To assume so already, way before we’ve even heard of whether or not they’re actually going to release on console yet, is a mistake.
Yes, it’s logical to assume they’ll release on console – they’ve added controller support, and another game they’re publishing – Throne and Liberty – is multiplatform and supposedly crossplay and cross save, and another game they’re in the making, the Lord of the Rings MMO – which is also on the same game engine as New World – is supposedly going to be crossplay and cross save.
However, they’re just publishing Throne and Liberty, they’re not the developers. And Lord of the Rings MMO is so far into the future, they havent even gotten there yet – they might not even know how to cross play with Azoth Engine, and putting New World on consoles might be their test for how LotR-MMO will act out. It’s entirely possible that the New World game will be released on console with no cross play on release, just to have it added years down the line, and by then there’ll be so many servers set that people wont transfer, and unless they merge “console servers” with “PC servers”, the player bases wont ever touch.

Anyway, my belief is that they’ll keep New World up and running, push it to consoles and hope people buy it and play it there, so that they can use console-NW as a “testing ground” to squash the bugs when it’s still New World, just to have LotR-MMO off to a better, running start, when it is finally released. Regardless of how many copies they’ll sell on consoles, they’ll keep New World operating because they need something of their own up, atleast until LotR-MMO comes out. The “future” of New World is basically guaranteed – from AGS side – atleast until then.
After the LotR-MMO release? New World is on shaky ground, and its future is all depending on how well recieved it has been meanwhile, from now till that LotR-MMO-release.
But even if the devs keeps the game up and running – by life-support, if needed – there’s no guarantee the game will be “alive”. The playerbase could shrink drastically – which it has, I’ll show an image later on – but it could also explode dramatically – which I find unlikely. It could also be that the devs do come back and give good content to the game, enough so that the playerpopulation will come back to atleast a reasonable level again.

This is what I find most probable, but I cant shake the worrying feeling, that the “cool stuff!”-content that AGS wants to share with us, and the future roadmap they’ll show us, wont include anything meaty – it’ll all be pointless, useless, boring.. so much so that people will stop playing all toghether, and that the only players playing the game will be the ones that bought it on the most recent sale. They’ll chose a server, hoping to play with lots of people, and just…run around in a ghost world. They, and fifteen more who just bought the game.

If that happens, the devs will force the game to be up – they’ll need their test environment for LotR, after all – but it’ll be a life-support they’ll unplug the same day that the LotR-MMO comes out. It’s quite a pessimistic outlook, but I can not help it. AGS hasn’t given us much to go on, we have no info, and we’ve been in the dark for months.
Season 5 is now a week past it’s original date, and we still havent heard anything besides “well, news within a month. Probably”.

So, I’ve been playing some small games the last few weeks. It’s been kinda busy at home, so I have not had much time to sit down and play any longer sessions. Backpack Hero is actually kinda fun, to be honest. Besides games, all I’ve done at night to relax is rewatching Star Gate Atlantis. It’s a good series, still!

I also decided to play through some old DDDA, but modding it as much as I can. The first few times was fun, but I’m curious as to how mods can change that experience. Hopefully I’ll have some time over for that soon.

I have to do Christmas decorations this year. I dont like Christmas, but the kids do, so..

Let’s start, I guess.

Welp. Fall damage is a thing.

So, the last two weeks or so, I’ve been incredibly low energy. Tired, sleepy, easily distracted, uncharacteristically moody – if it wasn’t bad enough, the last week I’ve also been having insane headaches, felt like my mind was “split and shifted”, as if the left side of my mind was slightly shifted to the right and my right side of my mind was shifted slightly backwards and down to the left. It sounds stupid writing it out like this, but I can’t really describe it better. It’s kind of like a broken glasspane.

It’s better now though, it’s as if I still feel the “crack”, but it’s not as bad. I’m still very tired and can’t focus properly though, so I havent been able to hang out with the guys in the company as much. I’ve tuned in on discord, talked with them some, but then I just feel like I’m so drained of mental energy I’m sleepy and even forget I’m in a call. There’s people talking, but I’ve stopped listening, like I’ve tuned out a TV in the background. Trying to do something ingame is equally weird – I’ve pulled stuff out of my storage from another settlement in order to have it on me so that I can put it on the trade post, and running between the storage and the trade post I’ve forgotten what I’m doing and just open up the trade post to browse wares. I also spent all my savings yesterday, because a song I’ve been looking for actually was on sale. Instantly bought it – didn’t even recognise the fact that it cost 97% of what I owned at first. I was then extremely surprised that I didn’t have any money left. It wasn’t just a case of impulsively buying something – I saw the cost. I knew how much it cost. I also knew how much money I had. I just didn’t realise it was going to be withdrawn and leave me with nothing left.

So yeah, that was a fun realisation.

So I just gave up New World for the moment and decided to occupy myself with other stuff. The kids are home with their mom this weekend, and because she picked them up Saturday instead of Friday, the kids aren’t going to come home today, on Sunday – she’ll keep them until Monday morning and prepare them all for school instead. Which means I’ve got all until Monday afternoon until I’ve got the kids back. What am I going to do until then? Movies? I’ve spent all week with my youngest at home because he was sick – and I’ve honestly didn’t mind, because that meant I didn’t have to walk him to and from kindergarten – and all we’ve done is walking the dog and watch movies. I would like some variety. Granted, we’ve mostly been watching childrens movies and Gigantosaurus on Disney+, and on the evenings I’ve watched anime, but still. I did get a game on extreme sale, but even that I can’t do – it’s an FPS, and I simply dont have the reactions for it at the moment. I can’t even doomscroll on Facebook anymore, because I got hit with the lock-out info that is “hey, subscribe for a bunch of money so that you still see ads, but we promise you we wont sell your info *wink, wink* – or you accept that we sell all your info to advertisers”. So, curiously, I looked up what they’re selling, and…they’re selling everything.

Ever thought it was kinda funnily weird that you suddenly got ads for something after you’ve posted a meme? It’s because they scan every photo you post, and then sell that info to advertisers. Post a beach picture, and you’ll get sun-travel ads. Post a birthday picture, and you might get “relevant ads” for it. Write a comment? That’s scanned and sold to “relevant advertisers”. Your religious and political view? Scanned and sold. Your liked groups? Scanned, compiled and sold. Ever wondered why stuff you wrote in Messenger to people ended up as ads and then chalked it up to just “weird”? No, it’s not. They go through everything you post in messenger as well and sell that stuff. Your cellphone data – that’s scanned and sold, everything from your model number to your current battery level. Everything they’ve got access to on your phone that you’ve ever told them once that they could get access to, they sell – including when you’re uploading cellphone images, you give them permission to access your images; those are scanned and sold. Think about that for a second.
Then I’ll tell you that they revealed that other cellphone info are sold as well – like your actual, current GPS info, or whatever your phone picks up through the microphone. Every sound you save, everything you say near the phone, everything. The microphone is very rarely actually off, there’s almost always something that keeps it active – ever used the “hey Siri” function? Then the mic is on, and facebook have access to your mic. Which they scan and sell info of.
So they basically give you the chance to “hey, pay a subscription fee that is ridiculous for what you get and still get ads, or you sign up to have everything about you, your phone and everything you’re currently doing sold to advertisers – nothing is private”. And that subscription fee? That’s insane. If you’ve got instagram, that counts as well, but as a separate fee. So if you’ve got an Instagram and it’s connected to your facebook, you’ve got to pay for both (although the instagram-fee is lower than the facebook-fee), because if you only pay the facebook-fee, and not the instagram-fee, they’ll still get your facebook-info through your instagram that you aren’t paying for, and sell that. So if you actually want to keep your privacy, you’ll have to pay €21 each month – it’s “lower” if you’re using browser only, but if you pay that fee, and then go on using the facebook, messenger or instagram apps, then that fee “doesnt apply” and they get access to your info and sell it regardless. That’s €252, or £220, every. Single. Year.

It’s “hey, either we drain you dry and still give you ads, or you give us everything about you and your phone and all that is on it and we’ll sell it to advertisers”, on top of the stupidity that is, if you pay the “web browser fee’s” and then use it on a cellphone – either through mobile browsers or the apps – it doesn’t count. They’ll sell your info because now they accessed it through the service you didn’t pay for them to exclude – the cellphone. So yeah. I actually downloaded all my photos and videos I’ve posted and then deleted both Instagram and Facebook. It wasn’t even a hard choice as such, social media is awful and doom-scrolling Facebook is mentally unhealthy after all. But you dont realise how much time you’re spending on it until you’ve deleted it.

So I did what I also realised I do every November. I booted up the Blizzard client and bought myself a month game-time on WoW. I’ve got to be honest, I dont have the reaction times to play that game either, because I’m dying over and over just trying to kill 3-4 enemies in a group. But I noticed that they’ve apperently changed their payment model – you dont have to buy every expansion they’ve released to “be caught up”, as long as you pay for a months playtime, you’re good to go for every expansion up to the current one. So if you dont want to pay a lot of money, you pay for one months gametime and you can do everything except for the things in the latest expansion – which, to date, is the Dragonflight. Meaning, you can get everything between World of Warcraft original, up to Shadowlands, for just the cost of one months playtime. The next expansion that comes out next year, The War Within, seems kind of nice as well, and when that thing launches, one months gametime will also include Dragonflight.

As I dont really have an interest in WoW anymore as such, I’m not going to buy the expansions. As it seems, I’m apparently content of playing WoW a few days every November and then forget about it for a year again. But I do admit that it’s a very kind monetisation model – you don’t exclude too many people from being up-to-date with huge paywalls. Although, if I were a “WoW-fan” still, I probably would still like to have the physical Collectors Edition boxes.

The reason I dont have the Vanilla and Burning Crusade box, is because I started to play in 2009, the summer after Lich King came out, so I didnt buy the separate boxes – that’d be way too much money, so I bought the physical “Battle Chest” that contained “everything previous in one”. I figured that I’d try the game out and buy Lich King if I like it, and oh did I. I spent basically that entire summer in Azeroth, mostly just slowly leveling my Night Elf.
Then I just kept playing for a while, although not as intensively. But for some reason, I stopped after Pandaria, having joined a guild an all, Immortalis on Argent Dawn. They were a wonderful bunch of people, and I did have lots of fun. I think that the lonewolf in me just couldn’t handle “lots of people” back then, and eventually I just… stopped coming back.

Now that I think about it, it’s almost the same thing I did with Destiny 2. I played solo for so long, and eventually found a great clan to play with – UK Nightfall Raiders. We played so much, did tonnes of raids, ganged up to grind all the weapons and such. Then life came barging in and I just…stopped. I tried to go back a year later, and they let me – but I just couldn’t get back into it. Not counting the times I’ve logged in and played for a few hours and uninstalled the game again, I haven’t played that game for the last few years. Looking back at my Playstation and Steam Purchase history, it seems that I swapped out Destiny 2 for Monster Hunter: World, Path of Exile and about that time I also bought New World for the first time. Between the last time I played Destiny 2 and when I bought New World, it was just a few months, as I dropped Destiny 2 somewhere around February-March 2020 and I bought New World Deluxe June 2020. Granted, New World didn’t actually release until late September 2021, but I played a few betas, and I played some of the new Tomb Raider games, BioShock collection, Vermintide 2, loads of Satisfactory, some Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen, kept playing the souls game a bunch, and as I said, Path of Exile and Monster Hunter: World for a while – and I cant forget Elden Ring when that game launched.

I’ve got loads of games bought and played since, but not to an extent that I’d say I “swapped over” to them. Buying and playing Vampire Survivors for 30hours in total, getting Back4Blood and playing 190h, or buying Borderlands 3 and getting disappointed for 65 hours isn’t really “swapping over” in my book. Sure, ok, 190 hours of Back4Blood might seem like I play alot, but in reality it’s not. It’s 190h over the span of one and a half year, and besides, there’s plenty of hours of that, that is just me sitting in a menue while I’m doing house chores, like cooking, doing the dishes or something. Sure, Back4Blood was kinda fun, but it got stale real fast, and even though I did buy the first expansion, Tunnels of Terror, and played that a lot, I didnt play the second expansion, Children of the Worm, at all. I bought the expansion. I just never played it. There’s supposed to be a third expansion out now, River of Blood, but I haven’t seen any of it, not even when I’ve tuned in on Twitch and watched some of the “B4B-streamers”. They’ve always been playing the tunnels or the stuff with the Children of the Worm, so I guess the third expansion didn’t really grab people?

Anyway. I’m way off tangent here. I’ve ranted for so long now, and what I initially wanted to say, was that I wanted to play one of the new races in WoW that came with the expansion Battle for Azeroth. They’ve changed up so much in the character creation that it actually took me over an hour to realise that you’re supposed to right-click the race-profiles to see their racial abilities, and it took me even more hours to realise that I didn’t have to buy the races, but that I’m supposed to play through longwinding quests to “unlock” them.

So that’s what I’ve been doing. Since yesterday, I’ve been playing hours and hours on end, just to level a character up to 40, so that I could start unlocking the new races.. and I’m lucky I already had a level 34-something Alliance Pandaren, and that I had a free character boost to 60, because actually leveling up a new character to 40 on both Alliance and Horde would’ve been a pain.

So I kept playing my Mistweaver Alliance Pandaren until I was 40, and then I played through all of the “unlock-quests”, so now I have all the Alliance races to my disposal. Then I used the character boost to boost my goblin mage to 60, and started to play through those quests, and I’m still not done.

You know what the funny thing about all this is? The last race to unlock is the Vulpera.

The actual race I wanted to play.

So, I was playing alot of New World lately as I’ve said, and having a real blast. It got a new expansion that seemed to sit well with a lot of people as well, however, it also brought issues.

The first issue you’re hit with is the queues. Like right now, I’m thinking if I should get on or not even bother – even if they increased the limit of players per server to house three thousand players, I’m looking at a queue of fifteen-hundred people. That’s over an hour in queue, if I’m lucky.
If I’m unlucky, I’m gonna sit through that queue just to crash immediately upon entering the game. Going in and out of dungeons – which is the main reason I’m playing the game basically – carries the risk of crashing as well. Teleporting anywhere is a coin-toss. That’s the second issue.
The third issue is that most of the items I would like, or even need you could say, is locked behind PvP. Now, I definitely dont mind that PvP is in the game; I think it’s healthy for a game to serve a lot of different populations, intertwine them of sorts, so that they need each other – gatherers need buyers, crafters needs customers, dungeoneers need crafters as well, PvP’ers need people filling the tradeposts, and so on. However, I dont find it reasonable to put items behind forced PvP, which basically is what has happened. Almost everything that you find in dungeons is Bind-on-Pickup, which means there’s nothing to sell, so little to no money are gained from doing it. So if you need something, you better get it yourself, because you’re not making money anymore. And if you wanted any of the new items that is best in slot, you now also need to play PvP in order to get them, unlock their perks and even to get the mods you need to get them, basically.

I havent played PvP in this game for a very long time, for a reason. To force me to play PvP just to be able to do the things I do like to do is utterly insane. And I dont really care what anyone says – it’s not the same thing to “force PvP’ers to play PvE to get an itemdrop”, as it is to force PvE’ers to play PvP.

First off, you need to get your way to an area. That’s never difficult. Then you need to “farm” a mob, which might be quite boring, but everyone else is doing that very same thing; you to type a few words in chat to ask to be added to the raid-group doing the farming. Then you sit there for at max an hour or two, while either participating in killing said mob within seconds on spawn, or you just go do something else, like read a book and watch tv and just pick up the loot that drops from the mob everyone else kills for you. When you get your stuff, you move on to the next spot and do the same thing there.

However, to get the item that I wanted, as a PvE-player, I had to play dozens and dozens of hours of PvP, just to have a chance to get said item to drop, and a random amount even more to actually get it to drop, and then I had to play even more dozens and dozens of hours just to get the player-kills I needed. And that was for one item. I was lucky and got two drop fairly close together, meaning I got a shield and a greatsword that I could equip at the same time to use while farming. But then there’s a pair of pants, a chest piece, an amulet, a headpiece, and a blunderbuss to get as well, and they’re just even further into the PvP than the other things. I wanted the shield Michael and the greatsword Serenity, which both could drop after track 20, and that took dozens of hours to just get to, and even more to actually drop as I said. However, I still havent seen the pants that has the same drop-range. I’m not at all close to the amulet or the blunderbuss – which drops at track 50+!
I can just forget the headpiece and chestpiece as well, since they’re deep down in track 100+! And that’s just to have a chance to get them drop, which isnt even a guarantee.

You cant compare playing PvE for a few hours to “farm” – meaning, standing there watching a group of fifteen to fifty other people actually do the killing – a mob to get your desired item to drop, with the absolute garbage that is being forced to play PvP for upwards of literally hundreds of hours just to get what you need and then upgrade it. Ofcourse it’s bad to “lock” an item behind a particular game mode alone, but it’s one thing to make it hard for the other “population” to get, and another to make it impossible for them to get unless they get involved with that kind of game. If you made the “PvP-track-only items/mods” extremely rare drop in PvE, and have the “PvE-farming items” extremely rare and expensive on the PvP tracks, that’s one thing. Atleast both populations have a chance to get them without being forced to do something they actively despise.

I actually caved in and ran a bunch of PvP-missions in the game, just to get my PvP-track levelled enough to get that greatsword. It’s three missions of “go here, pick something up, be in this are for ninety seconds, drop something off at that location and go back home”. I ran that bullshit for almost an entire week before the greatsword dropped – and before that dropped, the shield dropped as well. I got it, just to find out that I needed to play actual PvP in order to actually get the bricked piece of scrap metal to be something useful. I bit the bullet and actually did it, because that was what was required of me to “unbrick” them. And I succeeded, and now I’ve got two artifacts which is really good for what I wanted to use them for, and I thought all bullshit was done with. Until I realised that I needed to upgrade another artifact with a perk….that was also locked behind PvP-track, or if I wanted to spend forty thousand gold on the trade post. That’s per craft mod, meaning that every item I wanted that perk on, that’s another forty thousand gold, each. Unless they increased in price, which is very likely.

I just… dont have it in me. I used to love this game. But sitting in hours of queue, just to be plagued with bugs and crashes that gets me back into queue, and while playing be forced at every corner to play PvP? It’s taking a toll.
Especially since the “Summer Gang” almost stopped playing as well. Almost every time I log on, I look at the ingame list, and all I see is new names that I havent played with yet, or that I have played with…and most of I would prefer not to.

We got a new member a month ago or so, which is a really good recruiter. We were suffering a small player population in our company, and he’s been doing really well by getting people in. However, it’s been very indiscriminate – we wanted max level players who was interested in doing high level mutations, that was fun, friendly and interested in cooperating and learning if necessary. For a few weeks, we got a bunch of returning players, who wasnt maxed level. We got a solid amount who was mostly interested in PvP. We had a good bunch that wasnt interested in joining discord to hang out or coordinate anything. We’ve gotten a good bunch who was set in their ways of how to play – which either was very chaotic and stressful, or simply just…not really very good, and they just didnt want to listen or learn any tactics at all.

It doesnt matter how many times you’d tell them that “we cant do this enormous pull you’re trying, you cant hold the aggro and we cant kill them fast enough” and they still do it. And then complain that someone else does something bad – like the damage dealers aren’t doing a good enough job killing, or the healer not healing. Like… you’re getting zerged and fail to hold aggro. That’s on you since you decided on this massive pull. Not ours.

We have healers that waste all of their massive heals and high cooldowns on…the players who is full health. The best in slot healing staff always have a perk that lowers every cooldown with every normal attack you’re doing, and we’ve got some players that understands the function of it, but still does not seem to use normal attacks, and some have even stated that they dont think it is a good perk. Like, listen dude, the fact that you can not succeed in doing overlapping spells, does not mean that it can’t be done – it only means that you dont want to put in the effort in doing so. I dont even understand why you chose that role, if you cant play it and refuses to learn it or improve on top of it?

We have damage dealers who thinks the best weapon to do damage with in dungeons is the ones that have mathematically been proven is the absolute worst in the game. I dont care how sweet that musket looked, you dont randomly pull it out for a boss fight that is known to also behave irratically if too many players are at too long distance away, especially not unannounced.
We also have damage dealing players who’ve been explicitly told, that you cannot bring certain weapons into a dungeon, because there’s already another player bringing one – and multiple of those interferes with each other – or that it’s not useful, or that we need them to bring something else, and they’ve promised that they wont. And “oops, I did it anyway”.
We’ve had players being told that we need a certain combination of weapons, and they offer to bring them – just to realise, that at first opportunity arisen they’ve swapped away from those.

Sure, it’s their game. They play their game that they bought for their own money the way they want. I understand that sentiment. But if they want to play in groups as if they’re playing with randoms, why dont they just join in with random groups and do that? Why do they have to play with people who have specifically said that they want to coordinate efforts to play a certain way, when their “random playstyle” completely wrecks that effort of coordination?

It basically means that even though I play with the company in name, I’m effectively playing with a group of randoms, who all talks over each other, disregard any tactics, uses the worst possible weapons imaginable.. if it was actually a “PUG” I was playing with, I would’ve assumed it was someone trolling everyone and would’ve just dropped that group upon finishing the dungeon and found someone else to play with. But this is people in a voice chat, people in my own company. They’re meant to be the people I play with, and somehow, over the last few weeks, it’s all become this…frustration-pit, of random people playing their own game while being more and more annoyed with each other because noone listens.

Out of dungeons and other missions, they’re fun. I like them – atleast most of them. But as soon as we start playing, it’s like…
I dont really have a proper word for it. But some of them, I feel like they could just have been one of the random PUGs you find while just randomly group-finding.
And I know, I’ve had a few fun such PUGs; at one point during last season, I found a medium armor rapier tank, once I played with a hatchet damage dealer, I have played Void Gauntlet damage dealer myself. This season I’ve played as a flail-healer, which actually worked in the dungeon I did it. This season I played with a blunderbuss and flail-and-shield-tank, and it was fun – although, not in the absolute highest mutation there was, we stuck to M2.
But most of the time, it’s just frustrating to play with randoms, and playing with my own company is starting to feel more and more like playing with randoms. And it sucks, because it used to be so good, so fun.

I know I’m hardly in a position to “make demands”, seeing as I always was the newest member with the least experience and knowledge this summer, and I did a lot of mistakes which needed to be compensated for in all the dungeon runs – and a lot of these new company members is probably in the same situation as I was. I know it’s a poor way to “pay it forward”, to be impatient and not show the same courtesy to new players that was shown me.
However, the difference is; I listened. I took note. I didnt necessarily understand immediately always, but I brought this new knowledge and tried to apply it, until I got it. Until I saw why specific weapon combinations were necessary, why certain skills was not as good as I thought, because I understood the importance of the “recommended” spells.

I adapted myself as much as I could – I never vehemently disagreed with the one guy in our company that is basically a walking encyclopedia of the game and then make insunations that he simply dont know enough, I dont dismiss it when someone points out to me that the skills I’m using is actually not suitable for what we’re doing because I have hundreds of hours of subpar healing. I never pulled the “I’ve got top-leaderboard rewards, so I dont care about your suggestions”-card to our company leader – although, I’m convinced that if I also did that to said player, now that I do have a good few of those, that he would not listen to the advice I’d give, because he’d still find a way to dismiss me.
I dont completely disregard it when people say that we need to have a certain weapon combination to succeed, just to then pull out a musket that takes seconds to reload between shots, miss most of them and do my thing just because “I think it’s more fun” – good, great, think that, I’ve got no issues with it, just.. take your musket elsewhere.
Not into the dungeon you promised you’d use certain weapons that we needed. Especially not when you had a chance to say in the beginning of the dungeon that you wouldn’t use said weapons, so that literally anyone else could have had stepped in and brought those very weapons.

It’s not all bad – we’ve got a couple of really fun and friendly players along with all of these other players. We’ve got Machi, who suffered PvP-missions with me for a week, we’ve got Thera who came back after a long hiatus just as me, and is currently suffering through side-quest levelling since AGS completely broke the main story quest, and despite now succeeded to grind all the way from late-thirty to early-forty level range, up to sixty-one, still cannot even access either Brimstone Sands nor Elysian Wilds, which is the two highest level areas in the game at the moment. The fact that it’s been over twenty levels of leveling through sidequests is honestly amazing, and I’m surprised she didnt just quit the game already. There’s also returning company players that was known in the company before, such as Bogdan, which has been loads of fun to play with.
But we lost someone from the “Summer Gang” because of the games new system requirement. That, and the fact that the expansion didnt really bring anything interesting enough to warrant buying a completely new PC. The same kind of frustration I’ve experienced has also driven two, maybe even three others, to take longer breaks this last week. Another has been working alot lately as well, and havent been able to log on for a good while as well.
I have definitely not been alone playing with these new company people, but it’s very rare now the last week or two that I actually end up playing with more than one other from the “Summer Gang” – often it’s me and four new ones, or me and one other and three new ones. It feels like if I could just as well have been playing with PUGs without voice comms.

I know this post is mostly negative, something I’ve been trying to keep off of this site. But I guess that the fact that AGS wants to force me to play PvP in their game, which never really was fun to play PvP in, that has loads of new bugs and crashing issues after having spend hours in login queue for, combined with the fact that suddenly our company is full of people not really interested in playing with others, bite back in voice comms instead of cooperating or is just simply bad at their role and dismiss any critique or advice and just try to have you believe it’s not their fault, it’s yours, and the fact that the “old people” I actually enjoyed playing with almost stopped playing..

Yeah, I know, I’m not completely without blame either. I decided to stick it out and play through that damned PvP to get it over with, and I’ve spent the majority of these two week doing just that. But then again, logging on and seeing twenty-five people online have been fun, until you realize that half of them is the ones you dont really want to dungeons with and the other half playing PvP – since that’s their main focus already – and then a few people still leveling up to do the activities you log on to do..well, might as well get that PvP done then, no?

I just.. cannot bear playing more dungeons with an overzealous tank, or a healer that thinks that the best healing spells are best used on already full-health teammates far away from the current battle, or damage dealers who think the best weapon to bring is a slingshot, and reading discord or ingame chat and see people arguing the weirdest takes – like the one that almost speccing themselves out as half-a-tank is the best use of their role as a damage dealer, or that the perk Refreshing Move is, in fact, a “noob trap” and you should bring a damage perk on the Lifestaff to bring up it’s “damage based healing number”, and thus “heal for more” – is, in lack of a better description, disheartening.

I love the Company. But the Company is people. And in my case, the people I spent the summer playing with.
These new dynamics in the company doesn’t sit too well with me, but I’m not sure if it’s just my autism getting the better of me – change is bad – or if it’s a change that has happened that is an actual bad one. Until I figure that one out, I’m going to keep this to myself for now – well, I guess it’s kinda out of the bag, since I know that this website has been found by a few (Hi, guys!), but you know what I mean.

And I think I want to clarify – I like these people I speak negatively about. They’re nice…they’re just so frustrating to try to play coordinated with, since they seem to think they dont have to put any effort into it. It’s less them, and more their playstyle and seeming uninterest in doing anything for the team.

And quite frankly, it just makes me want to go back to playing League of Legends.

It’s getting close – the New World expansion is next week, and I’m so looking forward to it I kind of dont even know what I’m doing ingame anymore. I dont even save the loot I get – I’ve got basic crap-gear I’m running around with, but I cant really be bothered with trying to find anything more useful to use, because it’s literally just a few days away. Four days.

I’ve got my eyes set on a few things though – I want to get a good flail, a good sword and a good round shield, get all the signs..and then make the Elite Island my home.
I know a lot of people are itching to try out the new “artifacts”, but other than a few good pieces I’ve seen, I’m not too interested in trying to obtain anything. It’ll be more like “if I find something and I find use for it, great”-kind of deal. There’s a chest-armor that supposedly doesnt weigh anything, which means I could probably use light armor, that chestpiece and a good shield without losing the healing bonus, so I might want to go for that one – that way I might be able to get a Lifestaff and Flail and shield healer going. At the level 100 on the Season Pass, there’s also an earring that seems pretty neat – it causes health potions to give 33% more health and gives empowerment and fortify on potion uses, as well as a free perk you can chose eventually. The drawback is that the potion cooldown is 20% longer – I’m also only interested in this, if you can stack Refreshing Toast on it, getting a lowered cooldown on potions, which should bring the cooldown to 108% of the regular timer, which still isnt that great, but a heck of a lot better than 120% of the regular timer. There’s probably better perks than that though, so I might change my mind about that in the future.

Besides those two, the only artifact I’m actually are keen to try out, is the Greatsword Serenity – which is unfortunately locked behind PvP as a random reward, deep into PvP as well. They’ve got something called “PvP tracks”, which is basically the equivalence of short “battle passes” for doing PvP – it only has three checkpoints, and then it refreshes and gives you a new “track”. And only after having fullfilled more than twenty of them, you can get the Serenity. As one of three possible rewards in each of the three checkpoints. But it’s all random; meaning you might be able to get it on the first checkpoint on the 21st “track”, but you might not even see it until your hundreth. I’m not touching that. Like, I legitimately rather eat physical gravel.

It’s just so insane to me, that the best PvE Greatsword they could create, which has basically no use in PvP, and they lock it behind PvP. It’s got stacking empowerment on hits, bonus damage on heavy attacks and heavy critical attacks – which it is when hitting something from behind – as well as CD refreshing on any attacks, including heavy attacks. The heavy attacks are almost never used in PvP, because it’s too telegraphed to actually land on people, and that’s where this Greatsword shines the most. So you have to play PvP in order to get it, but using it as a PvP player isnt going to be a thing. It feels like either AGS doesnt even understand their own weapons, or they’re trying to force PvE players to play PvP, regardless of how little they want to play PvP. But I’m curious though.. there’s a slot for another perk, and in the faction store there is an item that grants gem-sockets as a perk. Does that mean that we can socket gems into that Greatsword, and would that be better or worse than a perk that anyone could slot in?

Eh, better not to worry about it. I’ll try to grab it if AGS gets their shit together and enables us to get that weapon in any other way other than playing PvP.

In other news, I’ve noticed that my kids are increasingly more and more interested in playing videogames. The six year old usually plays on my PS5, but it’s mostly Minecraft and the occasional Dark Souls and Elden Ring. I’m letting it slide, because mostly he’s interested in the mount in Elden Ring and gathering stuff – and if he gets a real taste for that kind of game early, I dont mind. The four year old though, he has mostly been uninterested in anything media-related except for his pad, which he uses to watch kid stuff on youtube and Disney+ and such, like Blippi, Grizzly and the Lemmings, Bluey and that sort of thing. However, I got a game on the PS5 that even interested him, a Dinosaur game called Gigantosaurus The Game. While he’s not progressing that far yet, atleast he got interested enough to learn the connection between the controller and what’s happening on the screen, and he’s quickly been picking up how to control the character!

While most people probably go “yeah, he’s four, they usually pick that up fast”, well.. my son is mostly non-verbal autist that doesnt really do that. The fact that it interested him enough is what caused him to pick up on the connection between the controller and the screen, which is a huge step forward in itself. Now I’m curious if that means that he’ll be interested in trying out more stuff, so…

I bought an arcade cabinet for kids! It has yet to arrive though, but when it does, I hope I can set it up as I want it and then I’ll let the kids play with it as much as they want, whenever they want.

It only has three games on it, which is a bummer, but it’s mostly just for starters to see if there’s interest. It has Pac-man, Dig Dug and Galaga. Admittedly, not the best games, but good enough for something like this, and if they’re interested in this sort of setup, atleast I know what to save up for in the future – there’s tonnes of youtube videos detailing how to build arcade cabinets such as this one, either with a raspberry pi and emulation of loads of games, or faking one with Evercades or Switches. I already have a Switch, and I’ve got my eyes on Evercade-stuff, so.. Maybe that’ll be something in the future?

Also looking around to see if I can find a bunkbed for the younger boys, which is nearly impossible. Either they’re super expensive, as in €300-530 depending on the model – I’ve seen some goes for €930! – or they’re just not cheap enough for the wear they’ve got as a second-hand bed. I’m not paying almost full price for a bunkbed that is five years old with noticable wear and tear and is wobbly like a bobble-head doll. Sorry, but that’s just not happening.

Since they share room, I thought it’d be good to give them more floor-space, and in not too long, I probably need to get the six year old a desk for schoolwork as well, which is.. not really possible if they’ve got a bed each. Especially not after I bought them a play-house to use indoors, that thing takes up so much floor-space.. But it’s used as a hide-out for the boys, and they like it.

Dont mind the lack of bedsheets in the bed. It’s the weekend the kids goes to their moms place – which means an all-weekend playing and singing session! – so I’ve stripped the beds for laundry.

In other news – I actually got my reading habit started up again. I dusted off my old Kindle, and apparently it’s been almost three years since last, according to the in-app tracker. I have read since, physical books and webnovels (Shadow Slave, by Guiltythree is surprisingly good, by the way), but it has not been on the same scale as when I was reading books upon books on the Kindle. I used to read hundreds of pages every day, on breaks, while sitting next to the kids putting them to bed, often pulled it up while waiting for the train or stuff like that. I got loads of reading done – according to the app, I had twenty-eight titles read only in the first six months in 2020. Not short books either, it was Warhammer 40K Omnibuses mostly, but several other fantasy books by Sara C Roethle as well. (I really do recommend her Tree of Ages-series, as well as her trilogy The Thief’s Apprentice!)

After having dusted off my Kindle, I booted up Calibre to convert a bunch of my old e-books I’ve bought over the years, into the Kindle format and loaded them into the Kindle. I even treated myself to a new cover! Nothing wrong with the old cover, it’s neat and black, but kind of scuffed for all the use over the years – it’s the Kindle Paperwhite 4, 2018th edition after all. Looking at it now, trying to find an image to post to show what the art looks like, I realise that it probably wasnt a licensed art on that cover.. The image on the cover actually is this one (second image), and I’m going to reach out to the artist who says he drew it and check with him if he knows the art is being sold as a Kindle Cover. If not… I dont know. That’ll be uncharted territory for me.

Looking to get the Wheel of Time book series on the Kindle as well, but for now, I noticed that both Sandy Mitchell and Sara C Roethle has new books out – Mitchell has released Ciaphas Cain; Vainglorious and Roethle has released an eighth book in the Tree of Ages, City of Ashes! – so those two are on the list for now. I also have the Amber-series loaded up if I want to read that again, as well as the Narnia Chronicles and twenty-three R. A. Salvatores Drizzt books that I got off of Humble Bundle a few years ago. Hopefully that’ll last me the rest of the year, and I’ll look into the Wheel of Time bundle after that. Who knows, maybe that bundle will last me atleast half a year on its own?

So, Diablo 4 did release, and it was indeed fun. I reached level cap on a couple of characters, aaaaand..
Got burned out on the game before Season 1.

It’s definitely a great game! I think it goes back to Diablo 1 and 2 alot more than Diablo 3, but it feels like they’ve learned quite a few things from 3 that they use. I think that if I hadnt played as much during the betas, I would’ve not been as burnt out, but here we are.

As I was looking around for other games to play after having been burnt out, I found a couple of other games – Brotato has been a lot of fun, Starship Troopers: Extermination was fun for a while, I tried to pick up Solasta again, but was missing the last DLC, Palace of Ice – which ofcourse had the things I wanted to play, the Tiefling. My idea was that I’d create a completely broken party.

– As a tank, I’d go with a Dragonborn Silver Oath of the Motherland Paladin – as a Silver Dragonborn, they’d have resistance to Cold Damage and a frost cone attack, and as an Oath of the Motherland Paladin, they’d get access to fire spells at level 3, gain a fire resistance aura for the party at level 7, and become immune to fire at level 15. Perfect cold/fire tank!
– The rogue I want to be a Thief, to be able to open any locks for me, and at level 13 they get access to magical items, disregarding class restrictions. Perfect for backstabbing and dealing damage as well. This one also had access to the language Spy’s Codebook, which I thought would get quite handy!
– I went with a Half-Elf for the Charisma bonus and boosted by Dexterity and Constitution with the extra points, which I hope to make her more useful with a few weapons – but the main point was for her to be my partys “talker” and boost the rest of the party with all of her songs and inspirations. I was actually thinking of bringing her down the path of College of Hope for heals, resistance buffs and ressurrects at level 3. Not quite a Cleric, but close enough, and I kinda wanted a bard for the novelty. Never had a bard in my games before.
– And the reason I needed that DLC – I wanted to make a Tiefling Sorcerer with Lightning Draconic bloodline. That way, I can get Misty Step at level 3 “for free”, extra hitpoints per level and 15 in AC for not wearing armor at all – which is pretty damn good for someone who’s going to go full glass cannon! – and at level 6 I get Lightning Resistance for an hour, and at level 14 my Tiefling Sorcerer sprouts Dragonwings. Her background is also “Academic”, which gives her access to using Manaclon Rosary – which is needed to enchant items. For spells I decided to go into a variety of elemental spells in the beginning – Fire Bolt, Ray of Frost, Shocking Grasp, Burning Hands – and eventually I’m just going to specialize her to do as much damage as possible. She’s not going to be a glass cannon anymore in the end, she’ll be a nuking fortress, hopefully.

This way, I can get fire resistances to everyone, my tank is immune to fire and resistant to cold, my sorcerer is resistant to lightning, my thief is a magic item-user who knows the way around locks, spy-ciphers and can hide anywhere in order to go in for the kill, and a smooth-talking bard who can buff and heal, as well as talk the party out of any dangers. Oh, and the coolest part – I’ve got a flying devil as my main damage source, a legitimate mini-dragon as a magic tank, a thief who can see in complete darkness, a bard that cannot sleep and thus can always be ready for healing or buffing or debuffing. I also made sure to try to get all languages between them, and only missed out on Gnomish and Druidic, one being a racial language and one being a class language, neither were actually used in the main campaign anyway.

Ofcourse, I got stomped by the fact that I could not create a Tiefling due to the lack of that DLC. When I eventually got around to buy the DLC, Baldur’s Gate 3 had already come out..

So I brought my party over to that game!

I decided to get Karlach, the Tiefling Barbarian, and respec her into a Paladin. Then I decided to actually do keep a Cleric in my party, so Shadowheart gets to stay. I do wonder if it’ll affect the story if I respec her into a bard…? If I even can, that is. As a rogue, I guess Asterion is quite doable – he’s an elf and a thief already, however, he doesnt seem to like my actions very much, as I’m running around helping people. I think I need to have him stay put during dialogues from now on, or I’ll tank my reputation with him completely. If he doesnt work out, I’ll probably just pick up.. I dont know, literally anyone else. As for “myself”, I decided to go full Tiefling Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer, but I’ve got to admit, it’s the first time I’m playing Sorcerer in any of these games, and it’s… definitely a challenge.

As of right now, that party is only level 4 though, the main reason is that I have not been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 as much as I would have liked. It is fighting for my time with family and another game.

Namely, New World! I’ve been deep-diving into that game again this summer, got offered to join a company and thought about it for a few days, decided to throw myself into the deep end and join them. Me, being the nervous, anxious wreck that I am, talking to other people? Joining the same people day after day and get to know them and play with them?

Where’s Lunnainn and what have you done to him?!

I ran into them a couple of times during some event runs, and spoke to them. Eventually I ran into them again while doing some PvP, where I was supposed to capture forts as part of my Season Journey. I showcased my absolute lack of knowledge in anything non-healing related and they still offered me a spot in their company, and for some reason, I decided to actually take the step. Usually, I’d get terrified, log off immediately and stop playing the game, but something, not sure what, got me to disband my one-man company and join theirs. They had been really friendly and fun during all the other occasions I had ran into them, and they were patient with me being the absolute newb I was, so I figured I’d give them a real chance.

I’ve been playing with them basically every day since, a couple of hours during the evening after the kids have gone to sleep – instead of watching movies, play mindless ARAM’s in League or playing something else, I’ve been playing and learning more about New World.

I was playing at launch for a good couple of months, but the lack of players to play with and the lack of endgame back then had me quit. I tried to come back a couple of times – for instance when the Blunderbuss released – but nothing really stuck with me, and at those times I was playing other stuff – most notably, Elden Ring.

This time, though, it was different. The had implemented “Seasons” which I thought would indicate that the game had come a long way. They had an entire new region to explore (although, that had come out last October – I just didnt play any, and I was knee-deep in other games, like Diablo 4 beta preparations and other stuff), and while there werent that many more weapons, I knew there was a Void Gauntlet that was supposedly pretty good to pair with a Life Staff – the healer weapon – and besides the Blunderbuss and Void Gauntlet, there was the Greatsword. On top of that, there was bound to be atleast one new expedition I had never done, in Brimstone. It turned out there was actually more than that, though – Barnacles and Blackpowder were definitely one I didnt even know about. I also always played solo, randomly teaming up with other players in the area doing the same quests as me, or queueing up for the same dungeon as me, but that was the extent of my experience that was “playing with others”.

But this one guy. He was outgoing, but also respectful enough to not be pushing when I didnt jump on the offer to join his company. He still offered me a spot in the group for events – just like I’ve teamed up with any other randoms, and he didnt get offended when I turned down his offer to join his company. The usual reaction I get from turning down offers like that is just insults and tantrums, but he was understanding and said that if I changed my mind, I was more than welcome. As it turns out, almost a week or so later, I actually did join them. We met again while doing this Fort Capturing as I said, and he asked me if I had thought about his offer to join, and I decided to..well.. take the leap.

They had discord info placed in the company tab, and I joined immediately. I had warned them that I was nervous and didnt really liked to talk much, so while I definitely could join in on voice chat to listen and acknowledge shotcalls, I was probably not going to talk much – which was also completely fine, the important part was for them to being able to shotcall and not having to take the time to type, basically. My thoughts were along the line, “this keeps getting better and better – what’s the catch?”, and honestly? So far, it’s been none. They’re a wonderful bunch of people. The company leader even joked once about me saying I was the silent type who ended up talking almost the most.

They let me play as their dungeon healer for the entirety of the summer, even though one of them was actually their main healer originally – apparently, quite a few people in the company had joined them as a healer and branched out into other roles – and while healing for them I actually built up a decent storage of useful items. Mostly for healing, but I do have a few un-upgraded tank sets, and a couple of upgraded damage dealing sets as well. Actually, all the way up until a few weeks ago, all I did was healing. We’re mostly running what is called “mutations”, which is that every week two new dungeons gets chosen to get mutated – there’s three modifiers to each dungeons that makes it harder, and while really hard – compared to the regular dungeons I’ve been running until I joined this company – they’re also really rewarding to do.
A couple of weeks ago though, the two dungeons that was chosen werent really what anyone of us wanted to play, so we joked around and got one of our main damage dealers to agree to heal for one of the dungeons for the entire week. And while he healed, I was running damage dealing, and honestly? It was more fun than I thought it would be, and I got to understand that role better – which in turn actually helped me understand the healer role more! At the same time, our tank and another damage dealer swapped places as well, and as this new composition, we actually managed to get through all the mutation levels and beat M10 – the highest difficulty – as this role-swapped team. In both dungeons!

The week after, the teams “original” main healer wanted to heal again, which meant that I was playing as a damage dealer again, which was completely workable – I was fortunate enough to being able to run the same gear I had as a healer for both weeks, with the exception of the Life Staff, which I just swapped out to a Great Axe with Focus as a stat. This meant that I was able to run the highest mutation dungeons with my healing gear, do crowd controlling with my Focus-stat Great Axe and deal damage with my Void Gauntlet, and just focus on leveling up my “actual” damage dealing gear. And unfortunately, I managed to get that levelled up only at the end of that week, but I did manage to get a few runs in with armor that gave me dexterity, a Great Axe for crowd control and Greatsword for damage. I ended up 6th place on scoreboard that week!

We even succeeded in doing a speedrun of the hardest dungeon, The Ennead, with me running that gear! If it can be called “succeeded” in getting silver-score that is. My weekly runs were over at that point, but atleast I was able to help find the path we’d take, how many points we were able to get – the “groundwork” for an actual run. In the end, the company managed to get 9th place in Speedruns, at 16:53 for gold in M10! Not my win – but I’ll still take it!

This week though, unfortunately only one of the dungeons work with the damage dealing sets I’ve upgraded – Ennead required two sets, one with Ancient Ward defenses, and one with Corrupted Ward defenses – and it’s also the one dungeon that has the most difficult mutations this week. So far we’ve been running the other dungeon – I do admit though, I kind of expected us to decide to run the more difficult one – so I’m back at running healing again. This time though, I’m saving my upgrade material, so that if I need to upgrade any other set to run as a damage dealer, either next week or just later this week, I should be able to upgrade an entire set immediately. I’m halfway there though, I need about twice as much materials for one entire set that I have currently.
All gear that can be upgraded starts out at the lowest of “gear score” 590, with the maximum “gear score” being 625. The amount of materials needed to upgrade any item from 590 to 625 is roughly the equivalence of the rewards you get from managing to get gold in M10 around one and a half times – fifteen times for a full new set – and so far I’ve got almost half, so probably I’ll have enough by the end of tomorrow, if we manage to squeeze in four gold-runs tonight and four tomorrow evening as well. Meaning, come weekend, I’ll be able to be both healer and damage dealer in either dungeon this week!

Sorry for the terrible screenshot quality – it’s because I run two games at once here just to get these shots.

I dont think they’ll ever read this, but..
Napkin, Fleur, Andicus, Jefery, Hellraizer, Obed, Ansved.
Thank you guys so much for all you’ve done for me. Thank you for teaching me all you’ve taught me.

And most of all, thank you for the friendship and company you’ve given me.