Update - March 25, 2016

Hello to all who have visited my blog. As you may have noticed I have been away for quite a while. Last Summer I was able to get employed Full-Time. As a result I am now working 5 days a week and have had a lot less time than I expected for my hobbies, including this Blog.

Gaming:
I continue to play Guild Wars 2 albeit less time online than before, however it is still my favourite MMO. In previous posts I mentioned looking into Wildstar and EVE Online. I did try Wildstar for a few months, however I found the community and the lack of folks to play with while leveling to be very lacking. In a way Guild Wars 2 might have spoiled me with an expectation that people still play low-level maps for fun. EVE Online is fun especially because I'm a guy who likes playing with spreadsheets, but it is too PvP oriented for my tastes, as such I have stopped playing it as well. I have had quite a bit of time playing the new expansion for Guild Wars 2 and I will be putting up a post about my thoughts on what has been done, and where I hope the game goes.

Books:
No matter how busy I get at work, I always make time for reading. As such I have gone through quite a few different novel series and I intend to put up reviews in the coming month on the books I have read. I am slowly getting into the Science Fiction novel series which is quite exciting.


Thats all for the quick update on what is happening right now, please leave any comments if you have an suggestions for what you would like to see more of.

What I've been doing until now

So its been about 4 months since my last Blog Post. During this time I wandered around a bit between several books, games and tv shows, which is why I didn't have any specific topics to talk about.

However towards the end of October during some casual gameplay I came across a new Guild to join in Guild Wars 2 (GW2). After joining this guild my interest in the game sky rocketed and while I wanted to make a few posts about it, between school and my new dedication catching up on content in GW2 I had less time to spend on creating blog posts. Goes to show that a game is more enjoyable when you have good company to play it with.

Since I have now caught up on all the living story content and achievements, I'm going to be going back and talking about what I've experiences this past few months.

Visiting Dry Top

First thing I did when I got back into Guild Wars 2 was try and catch up on the Living World story. I missed a huge chunk of content from the season 1 of the living world including the destruction of Lion's Arch. I have to say seeing Lion's arch a ruin and all those memorials scattered around the map made me wonder as to whether Lion's Arch will ever be remade, most of the buildings in the city were made out of the hulls of boats that were washed on top of the cliffs. Now those boats are all wrecked and in pieces, while it might be possible to repair them I suspect that Lion's Arch will get an overhaul, all those boats will have to be removed and brand new structures will be made.

Then there is the living story season 2, I am extremely grateful and happy that ArenaNet has decided to make each chapter of the Living World Story in season 2 re-playable as long as you have the chapter unlocked. I went and spent a few gems to purchase the chapters I missed, and I must say it was well worth it. These last few chapters have had a lot more intricate stories to them and I feel that the new personal story style approach to telling the living world is a brilliant system. It also makes sense to do it this way since from lvl 1-80 we've had a 'personal story' that used the same system to get us into what is happening in the Tyria.

The two new maps 'Dry Top' and 'Silverwastes' are also amazingly well crafted, when I first got back into Guild Wars 2, I spent most of my time running about events in Dry Top. The way there is always something happening, layered areas that can only be reached by clever use of the Zephyrite crystals is a good way to keep folks active in the map.

Then there is the main reason I'm staying in Guild Wars 2, my Guild. My last guild was friendly and somewhat active, but I guess I didn't click so well with the way things worked in that guild. This guild however, its a challenge to not get involved in the Guild Chat no matter how strange things get. Recently we started making animal noises whenever things seemed quiet, yes it is strange but oddly fun. For our Guild events (missions, challenges, puzzles) for several weeks now we've struggled to try and complete things on our own, only to need the aid of other guild in completing our objectives. This weekend however we were able to get through the puzzle and the one challenge we kept failing all by ourselves, I felt very proud and ecstatic of the Guild upon achieving this. I think I've finally found the Guild that I've been looking for.

TL;DR - I'm back in Guild Wars 2 having joined a new Guild and I'm enjoying myself. I will be updating this blog, hopefully more regularly. I've already got a few topics to post about this week.


More things to come:
What I think of GW2 - Heart of Thorns
Book Review - Sword and Staff trilogy
Game Review - Space Engineers 

Review of Wildstar

So yes I'm not the best blogger out there, as I am unable to stick to a single game. I've tried Wildstar out for 4 months now and I've lost my interest in the game. So here is my review of what I liked and didn't like about the game.

I loved that there was a lot lore and text to read through in the quests, I'm a huge lore fan so it worked out in my favor.  The customization options were amazing, Housing especially was very fun to figure out how to create something completely new. Housing and Role-Play were probably my favourite parts of the game. The ability to customize the housing plot any way you wanted to, allowed for nearly endless scenario's for Roleplaying. I created 2 characters, a scientist and a settler as such I got a lot of lore and I got to create several structures in the world.

That said I found the settler path to become a chore after the first month as most players had power leveled to max in order to hit the end game content as such I ended up alone creating structures by myself which took a lot longer than I would have liked. I'm not a power leveler, in my opinion doing that kind of thing takes away from the wonders of the game. As such it took me a couple of months to reach max level, and even so I found the game to be very grindy.
 
In fact there was a grind in pretty much everything there was in the game, which made me wonder....why am I paying ~$15 a month to work instead of having fun ? The crafting was interesting but involved playing a mini-game where you had a chance of getting exactly what you want. Coming from Guild Wars 2 this seemed strange. In my opinion if you had the materials, and the necessary crafting level then you should be able to craft it, not play a RNG game to have a chance at creating it. I found this annoying and going through the levels I found I leveled my character faster than my crafting skill as I just couldn't bare to continue playing the mini game anymore.

As of October 2014 here is my verdict :

I am rating this game a 7/10 based on how much I enjoyed playing the game. In terms of graphics yes I will give them the full 10/10 because the world did look quite beautiful and at times a bit awe-inspiring. I had heard that Wildstar was being aimed at the more hardcore crowd of MMORPG players, it wasn't until I played it for a few months that I realized that I probably didn't count as a member of this hardcore crowd. If you are a hardcore MMORPG gamer I do recommend giving wildstar a try, if you are not such a player hold off... this game is extremely punishing in terms of how much time and effort you have to put in to get much out of it.

The trouble with subscriptions.

So the thing about signing up for MMOs that have subscriptions, is that eventually they run out. This week my subscription for EVE ended up running out and I had forgotten to refill my Paypal account. So now I've got to spend an entire week and a bit without playing EVE (Paypal takes 6-8 days for Canadians).

So with all this free time I thought I'd check out other titles in the market. First I tried going back to Guild Wars 2. Unfortunately the main reason I got out of Guild Wars 2 was the immense lag I had to put up with whenever going to maps that had all the activities I wanted to take part in. Even dropping to lowest graphical settings barely got me past 30 fps not including sections where there were mobs of players.

TERA Online: 

So I decided to go and try out TERA Online, which is a free to play MMORPG with a cash shop. I'd originally avoided trying TERA because of the huge download size (30 GBs) and the speed at which they switched from a subscription to cash shop suggested that there may be issues with the game. That said after finally finishing my download and trying out the game, I have to say. Its actually fairly good. Right now I'm playing at max graphical settings with speeds above 40 fps which is awesome considering I'm not running this on a gaming rig. The graphics themselves are awesome, while Tera has a slightly more cartoony feel than Guild Wars 2 the level of detail and flair of the graphical designs have me enchanted. After playing around with the character creation for a bit, I settled on an Aman Lancer as my first main character.

My Aman Lancer: Rhelgha

Tera is an action combat mmorpg that adds an extra layer to combat in the form of having to aim all your skills. Even the Lancer, a close range tank class, has to aim his strikes in order to hit. After flipping through a few of the classes I stuck with the Lancer due to the fact that the lancer's defense revolved around using a skill to 'block' the incoming attacks. By default this block skill is bound to my right click button and it makes for an interesting combat style. I use my lance with my left click or other skills to damage the target, and whenever it looks like its about to attack. I have to use the right click and make sure that my shield is pointing at the source of the incoming attack. At first because the level 2 monsters do very little damage this seems like a non-important skill, but after getting to level 20. I'm totally in love with this combat mechanic.

The Arakia, an early game World Boss (lvl 20).

I've also started doing some Armor-Smithing since my character belongs to class that uses heavy armor. Right now I'm farming a boss monster called the Arakia for materials to create a full set of enchanted heavy armor for my first attempt at a dungeon in TERA Online.  Farming in TERA seems to be a slight bit better than in Guild Wars 2 as you get something every time you kill a monster, and so far the drop rate for rare items from this world boss has been pretty high. Where as with Guild Wars 2, I ended up killing the claw of Jormag probably a hundred time to get a very low drop rate of rare materials. I'm aware that now that rate has been increased, but the practicality of having to fight through an intense lag fest to get the drop is very off-putting.

So all in all, even though my subscription ran out. I have now experienced TERA Online and I think I'll end up spending a bit more time on this game. Since it is a free to play MMORPG this is going to workout as a good breather/ change of pace from my usual gameplay in EVE.

A small farm I've been operating out of, to collect materials for Armorsmithing.

(despite the watermark these are all screenshots taken in game by players, 2 of them by me and 1, I got off the web, because I wasn't ready to get a world boss angry and then pause long enough to take the shot).

Its cold out there.

So for the last few weeks I've been raking in the cash as an Ice Miner in EVE Online. I've even gone and made the most efficient fit possible for a standard Mining Barge.That said Ice Mining tends to be quite boring. Most times all I do is warp to an ice belt, set my ship up to mine and walk away from my PC for about 15 minutes. That said there were a few close calls, where folks have tried to gank me while I wasn't paying attention. That said it was well worth it, right now I'm making 19 million ISK per hour every four hours when I'm on. I've gone and tripled my savings from my first month of gameplay, which seems like a small jump, except I've also been spending like crazy on new ships, equipment and skills.

Now I have more time and money to focus on getting my manufacturing business up and running. I've started producing ammunition and drones, both of which are things that many people use up quite quickly. Lately though my corporation (Guild) has been trying to get me to take part in more PVE/PVP activities. In fact for this weekend we are getting ourselves set up for a free for all tournament using tier 1 frigate class ships. During the last tournament, in the very first round I had the misfortune of being set up against the person who ended up winning the entire tourney. This time around I'm hoping to be ready for all eventualities and make it to the top 3 at the very least.

In addition to all this, my corporation wants me to start working on getting ready for incursions. For those who aren't aware, Incursions are EVE's version of raids. I'm currently working on getting a battleship ready for Incursions, but it seems like I'll need a lot of time to get my skills up to par for this challenge. Right now I'm thinking of creating a close ranged DPS with a passive tanking ability.

Edit: I've also updated my 'about me' page for those of you who would like to know who I am. 

Here come the Big Drills

So as I mentioned previously, in my attempt to fill the gap until the release of Wildstar, I have started trying out other MMOs. EVE Online being the latest attempt. So far I'm loving how the game is set up so that in order to make any real money you have to get into some kind of 'Career' in my case I decided to start in the Mining Career and slowly make my way into Manufacturing. 

I may have gotten a little carried away with my mining career. Just this past week I started work on an Excel sheet to figure out efficient ship/skill setups as well as which ores would make me the most money. The end result was this:    Mining Chart.

It seems safe to say I've gotten a bit hooked on the game. However my recent attempts to get into gas mining in Wormholes along with my corp-mates have met a bit of a roadblock. I've heard stories of pirates in EVE Online but this was the first time I've actually met them. They are a full corporation of players hooked on PVP and equipped with some serious firepower holding my Corporation(Guild) captive inside our own Player Owned Station, in a relatively unpopulated Wormhole.

Once more I find further confirmation that I am more of a PVEer than a PVPer in the way that I prefer to stay out of such engagements. I honestly don't get the appeal of sitting on an exit for 4+ hours, just to attack the guy(s) who try and make a break for it. It is a very slow way to make money, yes there is a small chance of a exciting battle. But more likely than not, it will be just a one-sided fight with the other team just being wiped out because they weren't ready for you.

Merry Christmas All (Status Update)

This past week and the coming few days I have been taking off gaming due to family and Christmas related events in real life. However I do plan on having several posts ready to go for the new year. At which time I hope to have this blog running at full speed. 

Status Update:

• So I've decided to take a break from Guild Wars 2 due to my getting a bit bored with the content. I may return to playing after a while, so sorry to those who visited this site for my Guild Wars 2 updates.

• EVE Online is currently my main MMORPG. Until now I've been building up my starter character and familiarizing myself with the game. I've gone and joined a Corp and got myself a good money making mining set up. As this post goes up, I have finished learning a number of basic combat skills that will let me move on to more pvp/pve scenarios including Incursions. I've also started getting an Exploration ship set up, to start commenting on my adventures exploring space anomalies and wormholes.

• As for Wildstar, I will soon be putting up my takes on each of the classes as well as a few ideas on what I may roll on release.

• New topic: Novels. I am an avid reader of novels. I have read several amazing series and I will be putting up some reviews on what I have read.

I wish everyone the best of the season, and I am looking forwards to making this blog a bit more active.

Suiting Up

One of the most anticipated MMORPGs of 2014 is Wildstar. It was originally scheduled to come out at the end of 2013, but the developers (Carbine Studios) pushed it back for a spring 2014 release. At first I was saddened by this news. But during the last 6 weeks Carbine has been releasing new Class reveals showing off the various mechanics and how unique each of the Wildstar classes are. After checking out all the re-reveals and new releases all I can says is:

IT IS AWESOME. Not only did Carbine release new class pages with more details and lore about each class, but they also included a youtube trailer for each class, an Ask me Anything reddit thread for each class and a livestream where they showed the effectiveness of each class in PVE, Dungeons and PVP. 

Originally I planned on rolling out with a Warrior at release but now I'm torn between a somewhat familiar Warrior class and the newly revealed Engineer class. The Wildstar version of the Warrior uses a Greatsword

and an Arm-Cannon that doubles as a swiss army knife. While the Engineer is loaded with Tech all the way from its awesome looking Blaster to the Exo-Suit in the screenshot below.

Suffice to say I'm totally psyched for the game to be released. So for those of you who don't know what Wildstar is. Please check out: What is Wildstar to figure out why I'm so excited for it.

Launching into Space

While waiting on the release of Wildstar I decided to try out another Sci-Fi MMO. EVE online is an MMO based in space with complete freedom as to how you want to play.

For my first and at moment 'main' character, I decided to create a Gallente character. My goal with this character is to explore most of the EVE universe to get a better understanding of the game. For the moment I have been focusing on PVE and industrial careers. I started out with a Venture Frigate and now I`m using a Mining Barge to rake in the ISK at a rate of 7 million ISK per hour.

Even though I have been focusing on the Mining and Industrialist Careers, I have attempted the Exploration and PVE combat. Both of which have been very impressive for a ship based MMORPG. EVE online has all the combat roles one would expect in an RPG, the Tank, the DPS and Healer are all here in the form of ships. 

Overall the game is amazing and with a 14day free Trial, I highly recommend at least trying it out just to see if it fits in with your style of gaming. 

If you want to try out this game click here to get the trial and see if it is your fit.

New Games I will be talking about.

From now on I will be making updates about games I'm playing in addition to Guild Wars 2. Some of these are games I'm already playing others are ones I'm psyched for and can't wait to start playing.

First up:  Terraria

This is a 2D Sandbox game that can be played in both single person and online with other players. Right now I've been playing it by myself and I've been having a blast. The premise for Terraria is that you are in a randomly generated world of Terraria and your goal is to collect materials to craft weapons, armor and structures that not only allow you to survive but eventually fully rule over the game world. Pretty much everything you see in the game is destructible under the right conditions so it is fun to see people change entire landscapes as they create immense structures.

Secondly: Saints Row Third
I actually bought this game a while back and I've been playing it during my spare time as a type of stress relief. And I'll say this it is an awesome game. It is definitely an R rated game, but even so it is immensely fun. Customizable vehicles, tons of guns, gangs you control, and general mayhem you can wreck on the game world.


Lastly there is WILDSTAR

Now this is a game I am seriously psyched for. This is an upcoming Sci-Fi MMORPG being developed by Carbine studios. The premise is in a galaxy at war, a planet that was once home to an all powerful alien race who suddenly disappeared is suddenly rediscovered. And now every single race and faction is rushing to this planet to try and exploit the resources and secrets of the planet for their cause. In my opinion this is the game that will beat the great dragon we call WoW.

Look forwards to plenty of updates and screens of my gameplay in the coming weeks.

Status Update

Unfortunately I have started to find games other than Guild Wars 2 that I have become much more interested in. So I've decided to change this from an exclusively Guild Wars 2 Blog into a blog about my gaming interests in general.

To those who've visited and are disappointed. I'm sorry but this is what feels right to me. To newcomers welcome, I hope you will find my new series to be much more interesting.

Futhur updates are on the way