Steam Sale results

This latest Steam Summer Sale, I was prepared to ignore it all. As usual, Steam used my greed against me and won Round 497 of our bout. After the first day I remembered about the trading cards they usually give out for some arbitrary task, and of course went to investigate what they had for me to do this sale. Ugh, more discovery queue shenanigans. Fine. 

Hurrah, I got my three cards for the day. Now to list them on the market…oh balls. I don’t have a phone that can get the Steam Authenticator app so my market listings are held for 15 days before being posted. That means the cards for this sale will disappear before I can sell any. Alright. Gems. Yes, I can convert them to Gems, and eventually use the Gems to buy a booster pack of cards that I can list on the market. Fine.

So I ended up doing the requisite discovery queues each day, not really having any intention to buy anything since I had no disposable cash on hand. Then, the Walking Dead: 400 Days DLC appeared in the queue, and the 99 cent price caught my eye. Hmmm, well I do have just over $4 in the wallet that I’ve been saving through selling cards from other games…okay. Sold.

That, of course, prompted me to go over my wishlist and see what else I could afford for about $3. Happily, that was perfect for the final game in the Blackwell series – the only one I didn’t get in the Blackwell bundle last year.

I feel good about this sale. I didn’t get anything new that is going to end up competing for attention, and I didn’t spend anything out of pocket. I also didn’t agonise over missed opportunities to get bargains for games that I really want, but don’t need right now. And I did get to fill a couple of holes in my library that were pretty significant. I’m always uncomfortable starting a series if I don’t have the whole thing ready to go.

Okay, so that was a lot of words to basically say: I bought The Walking Dead: 400 Days DLC, and the Blackwell Epiphany this summer sale. Four dollars well spent.

Def FX – Psychoactive Summer

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June in Review and July Goals

It feels like I did more in June than I did in May, but let’s look at the results, shall we?

Still no FFXIV sub, so that was out. No matter, I wasn’t looking at it as a high priority anyway.

I didn’t quite finish my TSW goal of clearing Shadowy Forest quests, but I did complete one more quest hub, so I’m inching closer. It was the first time I’ve had to actually change my build specifically for a mission, so I floundered about in frustration for a while before I realised what was going wrong. 

Tried playing Long Live the Queen but I was on skype at the time, and it didn’t play nicely with LLtQ in fullscreen (which is how I like to play it) so I dropped it…and then completely forgot about it for the rest of the month. Oops.

Hearthstone was a debacle. I made it to rank 10 fairly easily, then spent the rest of the month consistently underperforming, and ended at rank 13. That experience was an inspiration for my last post.

While I did, in fact, end up buying the Humble Bundle with Shadowrun: Hong Kong in it, I didn’t play any Shadowrun. Instead, I finished Alan Wake, Cibele, and made some progress in Torchlight 2. Also put some time into Diablo 3 seasonal hardcore mode with my friend.

Goals for July

I am currently revelling in the 4th anniversary event in TSW, soaking up massive amounts of AP via Guardians of Gaia fights. So, since the event only lasts another week, the goals are to complete at least one more deck build – for the outfit, naturally! – before the event ends, and then close out the Shadowy Forest quests in the latter half of the month.

I’ve given up on ranking goals for Hearthstone, so this month I’ll just be playing enough for dailies to get done, with the occasional arena match. 

I just started The Blackwell Legacy, so I aim to finish at least three (but ultimately all five) of the series by the end of the month. Likewise, I have started a game of Sid Meier’s Pirates! which I may just cruise through (see what I did there) at a leisurely pace. So the goal there is just progress.

More Diablo 3, of course. The main goal with that is simply survival. See how far we can get before we die. I have two cheat death abilities on my wizard, and they’ve procced a couple of times on Torment IV, so I think we’ll be staying there for a while until we get some better gear. And if we do die? On to Torchlight 2!

Given the time I’ll be putting into TSW, I don’t think I’ll make it back to FFXIV this month. Perhaps August will be the month of my return.

Franz Ferdinand – Matinee

Sometimes I resent persistent games

When I was playing WoW, it was my main game. It was, pretty much, my only game. I would occasionally spend a couple of hours playing something else, something single-player, and something I could dip into without needing a whole session to reacquaint myself with everything going on. But that time was few and far between.

Then I finally kicked WoW to the curb. I’d been playing through habit rather than enjoyment for at least a year by that time, so I was a little reinvigorated by the prospect of all these bright shiny new games I could explore. At first, this included a variety of MMOs that were now on a F2P or B2P model (Rift, WildStar, LOTRO, TSW, GW2), and the lack of pressure to “get my money’s worth” out of a subscription was a huge attraction.

I also started devoting more time to non-MMO persistent games, like Card Hunter, Heroes of the Storm, League of Legends (briefly, I admit), and various CCGs – Hearthstone, Duelyst, Hex, and so on. This is where my current predicament lies.

Unfortunately, while I did manage to commit much more time to playing and completing the other games in my Steam library, I was conscious of that subtle pull to “do my dailies” in these persistent games. Whether they are actually called daily quests or not – login rewards, cooldown timers on dungeons/raids/spawns/other activity, weeklies, even such things as seasonal rankings that reset each month – they all have the same siren song. 

So here’s the rub. I could just devote myself to one non-MMO persistent game, and try to master it. Become the best I can be – I am sure I could reach at least semi-pro status with enough dedication. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to make one game my focus in life. I don’t want to repeat my WoW experience. I don’t want to forsake the rest of the gaming landscape in order to pursue glory in one.

And yet. These games have a hold on me. I genuinely like these types of games, but I am competitive enough to want to do as well as I can in them. I want to keep getting better at them. I want to maintain that feeling of progression. And you can’t do that with a super-casual attitude. Especially in a team environment. 

Meanwhile, in the MMO space, I am wary of those tricks like limited time events (with dailies, of course), login rewards, and suchlike, which both activate the optimizer/completionist in me and stress me out by pitting that part of me against the common situation of simply not being in the mood for that game or that activity at that time. 

That is why I resent these games sometimes. There’s no other point to this post, just complain.

And so, I rant at thee.

NiT GriT – Mechanism of Control