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Nick Yee – Replacing Gender Discrimination with Ageism

With my kind of luck, by the time I get to Old Grandma Hardcore's age looking for one more shot at fame, it will be nothing worth mentioning any longer.

GW2: One Liner Asides

Not to speak ill of anyone, but given the latest storm in the Reddit threads and a corresponding effort to increase red name posts in the forums delineating clearly what’s being currently worked on – even if it’s taken as bad news for a very vocal subset of the GW2 community – the winds of change for increased communication seem to be finally blowing.

Or at least, a small breeze is being felt.

Also, I think I’ve figured out where the stereotypical raider subset – you know, the elitist exclusive entitled bastard type who won’t ever shut up about wanting MORE challenge and MORE content for the only part of the game they think is worth playing, happily putting down others who don’t play their way or share the exact same interests and everpresently whining on forums instead of just gracefully bowing out for a while and playing another game – went in GW2.

Time will tell if they are too exclusive to come together to form a proper community. Their first challenge: Putting what they want into bullet points for communication.

Let’s see if they can come to a consensus agreement on what they would like, or if they’ll fail it just as badly as the concept of a united roleplaying community.

In other news, TIL that blue doritos point straight at charr butts.

(Yep, fell headlong into that goldsink too.)

Random Search Terms of the Last 30 Days

It’s been pretty hard to see what people have been searching for, ever since search engines like Google started masking the keyword phrases from statistics collection.

2,109 were ‘unknown search terms,’ which is what WordPress classifies masked phrases as.

That leaves us with only 231 to scan through.

13 of those were looking for ‘lesbian sex’ – of which I doubt my one post about The Secret World’s Dragon faction tutorial mission would really satisfy – and 4 of those for ‘animated sex’, confirming once again that the Internet is for porn.

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Wildstar

9 people have come looking for first impressions of Wildstar, while others have more interesting concerns on their mind:

‘wildstar adventures chicken’

– Oh, does it have chicken play like in LOTRO too?

‘wildstar first achievements’

– Are you looking for a guide which tells you which achievements to do first? Or trying to compare e-peen with who got a particular one FIRST? Like SERVER FIRST ACHIEVEMENT, WHOOOOO…

‘wildstar difficulty’

– Magic 8 ball says “Yes.”

‘wildstar dungeon slow’

– It’s you. You’re not hardcore enough to speedrun shit. Did you have -any- interrupt armor slotted?

‘what if my scanbot dies wildstar’

– Or maybe it’s players like this never getting taught by the rest, trying to sneak into LFD without getting attacked by toxic players. You… resummon it, by the way. (At least, that’s how it worked in Beta, when I played for a couple days.)

‘is anyone else stuck at level 20 in wildstar?’

– …no?

‘wildstar why i quit’

– Ah, ye olde search for justifications to rationalize your decisions gambit. Twice.

‘i just bought a year worth of game play for wildstar and its not there’

– That might be a good reason to see the search term above.

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Guild Wars 2

‘gw2 tengu data mined’

– …I wish. Cantha confirmed?

‘gw2 why is liadri so hard’

– …Because.

– Abaddon feasts upon the tears of your frustration. All your deaths to Liadri and cruel jumping puzzles are but sacrifices to the bloodstone that rebirth the coming of the old god, which will herald a new age of DOOM. See Living Story Season 5 – When Livia Returns!

‘gw2 charr gods’

– CHARR NEED NO GODS.

‘gw2 chaos of lyssa drop raate’

– Sucks. Like every other rare one-percentile-or-less desirable item out there.

‘main trin safe spot’

– There is none. Get gud. Learn to kite and dodge and condition cure bleeds and communicate with your team to make sure everyone’s on the same page. And if four of you cluster together during the cannon phase, you just killed the poor bastard in the other corner trying to spread the cannon fire out. ALL SPREAD or ALL RUN TOGETHER.

‘guild wars 2 austalian wvwvw player are fighting doors and npcs’

– Time to transfer to a higher tier server with more Oceanic and SEA opposition.

‘gw2 edge of the mists commanding tips’

– Wear blue dorito. Run away from any players from the other sides. Go in a big circle visiting any available objectives that give loot.

– Or conversely, bring some players used to real WvW with you, drop a few choice pieces of superior siege, chase away everybody from the map after one brief shining moment of swimming in loot bags.

‘gw2 large body’

‘gw2 norn boobs’

– Looks like there’s a niche for GW2 fetish porn. Any takers? You might get plenty of hits! Mix in lesbian sex, furries. and cross-species ERP and you’re golden.

‘gw2 best drop place for dusk 10 june 2014’

– If I knew, I wouldn’t be here wasting my time writing this post. I’ll be building a time machine.

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Miscellaneous

‘landmark game crashes’

– No surprise there. It’s beta, the devoted will tell you.

‘tinkers construct smeltery eats my ores that i melt down’

– Yes, that’s meant to happen. You need an outlet from which to release the molten ore and send it into a casting tray/box of some sort.

‘sleeping dogs how to break from getting arrested’

– Run or drive really really fast away from the sirens. Failing which, do something permanent to the annoying vehicles in your way. No one said being a undercover triad mobster would be easy.

‘i hate runes of magic site’

– Me too?

‘what happens when the clentaminator with red solution hits a shadow orb in terraria’

– Gee, that’s a really detailed question. How did you get here? I’ve never written any FAQs about Terraria! Short answer: Haven’t a clue. Maybe you should try it out.

‘tales of maj’eyal save game editor’

– Cheaaaat. Just use Exploration mode and be happy, eh?

‘people that are level 100 in mob war and need friends’

– Not me, I stopped playing that after a month. Try one of the ubiquitous fake friends sites for posting your code and scraping off a whole bunch of others.

‘i miss city of heroes so much’

– Me too. Pre-incarnate trials anyway.

‘mmos were never fun’

– I’m caught between feeling sorry for you and suggesting that if this is true for you, it’s time to stop chasing them and play something that -is-.

‘get to the blue mountains tsw’

‘why can’t i go to blue mountain tsw’

‘tsw where is the blue mountain zone’

– Seriously?! This is still a confusing issue two years later.

GW2: The Other Spectrum of Handholding

Lest it be said that I am not an equal opportunity fun-poker…

…here’s what might happen in a game which gives you plenty of choice, rather than forcing you and leading you by the nose down a 12-step program.

First Lvl 80 in GW2 – How Do I Get Good Gear?

—

I did have it in mind to make a beautiful-looking 12-step attunement-like chart that shows off the range of choice and alternatives for doing so.

But that would actually take -work- and time.

While that is on the backburner, if you did somehow stumble onto this looking for real help:

• Get a set of Soldier’s exotics from the Orr Temples for karma, or from WvW using badges of honor.
• Get a set of Berserker’s exotics and weapons from WvW, dungeons, crafting or the TP.
• Get exotic Berserker trinkets from crafting, the TP, or look into your Ascended options with laurels, WvW badges and guild commendations.

Those should -generally- stand you in decent stead for most power builds for dungeoneering and basic WvW until you have more time and experience to get all finesse and experimental with condition builds or more toughness/vitality/healing WvW builds.

And guess what, those won’t obsolete in a hurry with every new raid boss released! They’ll be good for a long time until you -choose- to upgrade them with fancy schmancy Ascended options.

Wildstar: Holy Hamster Wheel, Batman!

I lurk around in the Wildstar Reddit since it’s a hop and skip over from the GW2 one, mostly out of curiosity to see how their players are receiving the game.

Then I got sucked into a thread which asked if anyone was raiding yet, followed a link or two, and found the 12-Step Attunement Program to even qualify for Wildstar raids.

The infographic is certainly very pretty.

Can the enforced time-sucking design of subscription games be made any more obvious though?

It makes me chuckle.