For those considering playing GW2:
“BUT WHAT THE FUCK SHOULD I DO?! IS THERE NOTHING I CAN DO TO BE BETTER AT THE GAME THAN OTHERS?”
You got it. Now you finally got it, right? You finally got it right. It isn’t your character who improves – it is you. You get better. Your numbers on a crit don’t grow. You do, as a player. That is the only way to distinguish yourself from the shiny, shiny masses.
— Monkeibusiness, on Reddit, his whole post is worth a read
Taken slightly out of context, but describing my current overall state of mind pretty well:
When it comes to this particular topic, I am out of fucks to give.
— Syl, MMO Gypsy, on payment models in MMOs
Well, yeah, it -could- describe my opinion on payment models these days. Some people like subs, some people like F2P, some people like B2P, the game companies just shrug and put up a cash shop of some kind plus figure out a revenue stream, and I pretty much just think “when I want to play a game badly enough, I’ll pay what I think reasonable for it, however you charge… and when I don’t, I don’t. Your turn to figure out what my particular “wallet opening” points are.”
Some tips (for my personal tastes): Uneven playing field of some kind is a big turn off. Charging for something’s that nonfunctional or for beta testing or essential, as opposed to extra, items to be unlocked is a nuh-uh.
If what you offer is commensurate with current market values (where $5-10 can get you a small indie game on Steam to some kind of bonus or prestige unlock in an MMO, where a sub for an MMO is around $10-15 a month, and where the price of a new shiny exactly-on-launch-day box is around $80-150 (higher range for collector’s edition types), then yeah, that approaches ‘reasonable’ in my book…
But well, whatever. Syl’s quote mostly describes my current state of mind – I’ve got good games to play and am quite completely out of fucks to give.
Having voluntarily overachieved in GW2 for the last month or so, I’m just as voluntarily slacking off and ‘vacationing’ with a change of pace.
Been riding on the world boss train for a couple of stops for fun, while taking advantage of all the AFK/wait time to play Minecraft in the other screen.
Trying to learn all the strange and intricate mods I’d been putting off:
Got tired of sacrificing my own health for power in Blood Magic, so… enter the experimental pig-spawning conveyer-belt pushing delivery system for pushing mobs directly to one spot to be *ahem* converted into stored energy.
Upgraded to zombies once the system was tested out to be better contained and have no leaks.
Eventually, I think there’s a way to automate and automagically off them with a special ritual stone placed, but I haven’t got to that stage yet.
Thaumcraft 4 was a big effort to progress through and figure out.
Lots of scanning objects with a thaumometer to see what type of essences they contained, that could be used for research points.
(The Deep Storage Unit was noteworthy for containing an insane number of the Vacuos element.)
Lots of ‘cheating’ by following a wiki guide for exactly what elements to combine with other elements in order to form higher order and more complicated elements, so as not to go mad running out of things to scan for the desired element, or worse, having to systematically brute-force each combination.
Lots of starting simple… in this case trying to make the Thaumium metal by throwing iron ingots into a crucible/cauldron thingmajig that was previously primed with Nether Wart (which contains Praecantio aka magic and Herba aka plant essences. Only the first essence gets used and the second breaks down into its component elements and overboils with stuff. I -think- it’s called Taint but who knows… The good thing about living on an island in the sky is that one just dumps unwanted stuff by knocking a hole in the ground and letting things fall into the void.)
… Then attempts to begin something more complicated and involved. In this case, arcane infusion of a super simple Hoe of Growth recipe, which required the setup of the entire infusion altar arrangement, everything to be completely symmetrical (radially, ugh) and provision of glass warded jars of the necessary magical elements for that particular recipe.
Not really looking forward to the recipes that are even MORE complicated and risky.
Then there was the quest for a Laser Drill:
One of the necessary components was pink slimeballs.
Where can you get pink slimeballs? Apparently, they only drop from pink slime mobs.
How do you get pink slime mobs? You dump a bucket of pink slime onto the ground and wait for it to turn, well, if not sentient, then, “alive” or wriggling.
How can I get a bucket of pink slime?
Apparently, only a special machine known as a Slaughterhouse produces pink slime, as the rarer ‘drop’ from killing a livestock. The more common product is liquid meat.
Uh, ok. Enter impromptu cow spawning abbattoir / factory line.
It wasn’t a work of great art or design. It leaked. Cows got everywhere, under and on top of the pipes and had to be monitored and nudged onto the conveyer belt for proper positioning in front of the Slaughterhouse machine.
But it sufficed.
The laser drill is kinda a scary beast.
It produces this big white laser that shoots straight down and is apparently lethal to anything getting in its path. I only have 50 lives or so. Not verifying that statement if I can help it.
It eats power. It needs well over several thousands of Redstone Flux power to run at a decent pace, and maybe try in the tens of thousands RF per tick, if possible.
Prior to this I’d been sufficing with machines that generate 80 RF/tick and putting only maybe 2-3 of them together for a modest 240 RF/tick or so.
10,000 RF/tick?!
That obviously calls for a Big Reactor.
I’d built a very dinky-sized experimental one. I needed to scale up a little more.
This is probably still miniature by crazy Minecrafter enthusiast standards, but for me, this was a pretty sizeable undertaking already.
Took several real life nights to collect all the materials to build it up, even with a repeatable quest that gave 32 reactor casing blocks as a reward.
5 fuel rods, a hell of a lot of Gelid Cryotheum liquid to act as a coolant (passive, I think, but I still don’t understand three quarters of what I’m reading when I try to learn more about this mod).
Since I was going whole hog anyway, I glassed up three sides of the reactor so that it would look prettier.
Ta da.
The effort involved felt like a fairly decent long term multi-step project/goal for any MMO, really.
The care and feeding of this reactor is currently center stage.
I’d faithfully followed a simulator that told me it would produce 10,000 RF/tick.
Imagine my initial display when I put in a modest amount of the Yellorium fuel it needed and it only produced, oh… 1-2k RF/tick.
What? Were my calculations off?
Maybe…it was too little fuel and I needed to load it up with more?
I chucked pretty much all the Yellorium I had (not much) into it, gradually.
Slowly, steadily, it started to build up more heat and ramp up in RF production, 4k/tick, 5k/tick, 6k/tick…
Oh.
Except now I have no more Yellorium.
The laser drill is now hastily hooked up to it, operating at a much slower than desired pace, and focused on looking for yellow ore objects… in the hopes that it will eventually dig up enough Yellorium ore to sustain the reactor fueling it.
Guess we’ll see how that goes.
Why I Game 