Monthly Archives: August 2016

Not Fitting In

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Today’s post is going to be less gaming related and more something personal… With some gaming in the mix I guess. Bare (bear?) with me on this one, I have a very chaotic mind and a slightly chaotic writing style so I’ll try to make this as comprehendable as possible.

Something I notice as active gamer, blogger and online community member is the sheer amount of people that count themselves as introverts. I take a look around on Twitter, I read the blogs in my Feedly, hell I talk to some of my online friends and almost all of them identify as introvert. Some are a bit more outspoken about this than others and that’s okay.
I can get a bit cranky about all the “handbook to introverts” post that seem to pop up on the internet every now and then though. That’s the type of introversion that I can’t really deal with well. It feels a lot like attention whoring which, if I remember correctly, is not something a true introvert would be into at all. So if I rage about these things on Twitter now and then, don’t worry. It’s not that I have something against introverted people, I just have something against people that use said introversion to make them look like a special snowflake.

I myself am an off the scales extravert. I’ve done dozens of personality tests and all of them point in the same direction. I’m highly curious about new experiences, love to partake in social gatherings and have absolutely no issues making new friends fast or talking to strangers. All of this is actually me in real life. I thrive when my life is filled with exciting stuff. Social outings, doing new stuff, doing exhilarating things. I love the feeling of adrenaline pumping through my veins. I’m that girl who will go to the highest steepest waterslide in the waterpark and enjoy the adrenaline rush that I get when standing at the top gazing down what I’m about to do. I’m that girl who will stand on glass bridges over cliffs, staring into the abyss and loving it. I will be that girl who will be chatty with anyone at a party and go home with a new friend or a possible new friend.
This also has translated to my MMO habits for a long time. Due to work restrictions I’m more or less forced to be a “Low Energy” player. Someone who takes a more casual approach and enjoys games as they come. But in my heart of hearts I’m a “High Energy” player. I always want new stuff, more stuff. To be bigger, better, louder! I want to be the first one to race to max level in a new expansion. To get geared. To start clearing raids. More more more, higher higher higher. In my glory days of raiding in WoW I even tried to get into one of the best guilds at the time: Method. Unfortunately I got denied due to not having enough server first experiences but the hunger to join them was there.

If you look at this fact, and how I described earlier that I’m mostly surrounded by introverted people, it’s not strange that I have issues recognizing and identifying with their issues. Of course I am depressed sometimes myself. Ofcourse I have anxieties. Even though I like being around people and tend to draw attention to me I’ve also suffered from crippling anxieties that related to self-image and confidence.
However, where introverts experience their anxieties in relation to people, stress brought on by dealing with people and the fear of the unknown, my depression and anxieties usually have roots in lacking these exact things. I’ve had a very rough year where I was more or less isolated from a lot of social interactions. I was at home, unemployed and done with my education and it slowly drove me mad. I get my energy from being out and about and interacting with people on a daily basis. When I don’t get that I spiral into a black hole that is really difficult to crawl out of. Where an introvert will be happy when a big social event gets cancelled, since they don’t have to deal with the stress of interacting with people, for me it’s a major bummer. It’s denying me the energy and positivity I take out of these things and will confine me to my home where I’m alone, staring at four walls which I hate.

Looking at all of this it’s actually quite strange that one of my biggest hobbies is gaming. I guess there’s a reason why I massively prefer MMO’s over any other genre, but still. Gaming isn’t necessarily a social activity and it’s probably also the reason why I have periods where I’m just completely done with gaming and being a gamer. It’s a nice hobby to have though since it helps me get through days where I have nothing planned or when I have moods where I just want to be left alone.
It’s also the reason why I sometimes feel like I don’t entirely fit into the larger gaming/blogging/internet community as a whole. The internet is an increasingly “safe” domain for a lot of introverted people who are normally afraid of social interactions. It’s safer doing it from an environment where in essence you are talking to a person, but in reality you are typing on/talking to a screen. Whereas I’m way more comfortable talking to someone in person so I can read their body and social cues that you lack on the world wide web. It’s reading posts where people, very justifiably so, express their worry about group content, endgame content, about how to enjoy a game, about how to deal having to play with strangers. Posts I don’t really recognize any of myself in because I don’t have any issues with any of this. It’s people who say they need some alone time, to retreat, play alone or recharge that I don’t identify with. I charge up by playing WITH others and get drained when I have to do everything alone.

It’s all these little things that make me wonder sometimes, do I really fit in? Is this really the platform for me? Am I not to different from all these people I surround myself with? And honestly, up untill today I’ve not been able to answer these questions.

P.S.
As I write this it’s rather funny to realize that all my IRL friends are actually very outgoing and sociable like I am, all extraverts in a sense. And there I tend to not really “fit in” due to my “serious” gaming hobby. It’s kind of odd how the world works huh?

Catching Pokémon and Finishing Games

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As I sit down to write this post I’m still progressing yesterday and today in my mind. Both days have been exhausting in their own ways and both days managed to put a real damper on my mood. Especially trying to make it through an entire day of work while being so tired that I actually almost fell asleep a few times behind my desk has left me reeling. I’m still incredibly tired and will probably head to bed not long after this post is published, but I felt like I had to write to just get stuff off my chest, both good and bad.

First off…
I went to see a friend of mine yesterday who normally lives in Norway. For the summer though he’s actually visiting Dutchieland since his girlfriend lives here and I really wanted to meet up when he was here since he’s a cool guy and I hadn’t seen him in forever, not really counting the 3 hours after he landed somewhere before Christmas. So I took a train to the other side of the country and met up with him and her and it would be a day of watching “Stranger Things” (which I now need to finish, damnit), catching Pokémon at the local park and something I can only describe as a tantrum a 3 year old would be proud of during dinner. Which made the rest of the evening go by slowly and quite awkward. Only good thing is that I made massive progress in Pokémon Go, hit level 12 on my Trainer and got enough Eevee’s to get my first evolution… Which turned into Vaporeon!
For someone who is quite casual about the game it’s really nice to get a bit of progress in and catch/evolve some Pokémon I hadn’t obtained yet. I even managed to get a Pikachu, so that made me really happy aswell.

One of my goals for this month was to finish the Story Mode of Kirby: Planet Robobot. With me having to travel about 2 hours back and forth yesterday this gave me the perfect opportunity to do just that. I had been slowly pushing through all the zones, making sure I got all the datacubes in every level as I played. I actually managed to get all the datacubes, which unlocks a rare sticker, by the time I was in the bus home for the last leg of the journey. Which left me with just the endboss to kill. Or well “just the endboss”… The last Boss level of this particular Kirby game is a chain of bossfights. They’re all executed well and are all unique and fun, but holy hell. I never imagined that defeating all those fights would take me almost an hour, but it was definately worth it. As of now I’m at 70% completion for the entire game. I’m not sure if it counts stickers collected since I still need a lot of those or if it just looks at completion of the different game modes.
With finishing story mode I unlocked The Arena and the Metaknight Nightmare modes, both of which are fun to play. In the Arena you just take on bosses. In the Nightmare mode you rerun the game as Meta Knight and try to set a good time doing so. I’ve tested both modes shortly before heading to bed since by then it was almost 12 and I had to work today so I couldn’t really stay up that late.
In any case I can already scratch off one gaming goal of my August to-do list and this pleases me a lot. I’ve not been this hooked on a game in a very long time and for me to complete it and see the credit rolls within three to four weeks of buying the game is something that hasn’t happened in a very long time. Granted I could have played through much faster but I mostly play my 3DS on the train as I travel to and from work, which was just enough time to complete exactly one level. I clocked in about 10 hours on the game to finish Story Mode with all the Data Cubes. This is more or less in line with the average on “How Long to Beat”. Now I just need to 100% the game.. Which I plan to do eventually.

For now though I’m going to bed happy knowing I only have to work one more day this week and then have a nice gaming weekend to look forward to. I foresee a lot of Yo-Kai grinding, Crystal Tower and maybe even some Overwatch in my not to distant future.

Crashlanding

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When I got home from work yesterday I just completely crashed. Went to bed, got woken up for dinner, went back to bed again. Woke up around 22.00 feeling groggy and realizing that I hadn’t even called one of my best friends to wish him a happy birthday. Yeah. I was THAT tired.

Due to this I obviously also didn’t post, which is lame because I feel like I messed up Blaugust right from the start. Then again I hope to grind out two posts today (one in the morning, one in the evening) to make up for it so I can still say I posted one post “every day”. It’s really not that hard to write, but if your body and mind just work against you and the only thing you want to do is sleep it’s really hard to focus on other things.

As far as this post goes, I’d like to take the opportunity and rant a bit about Bard gameplay in FFXIV. I don’t like it at all. I loved the 2.0 Bard. Although damage may have been slightly bad it still gave me the Hunter Archetype to play that I know and love. Now with Heavensward Square Enix turned Bards into semi-casters, completely taking the fun out of the class. If I wanted to cast stuff I would go Black Mage or Summoner, not Bard. It’s really annoying too that you have to work with an immense amount of cooldowns and somehow have to weave those in between casts. It’s losing me tons of DPS time and honestly, I don’t know how to do it better at all. You can’t really move anymore, if you want movement you need to turn off your Wanderer’s Minuet but then your damage drops. It’s sucky. I don’t want to be a stationary caster. I want freedom to move, I want the old Bard gameplay back! And no buffing their shots/damage doesn’t improve the situation at all. Hell, stuff that I normally breeze through on Ninja like Ex-Roulette, Weeping City and Void Ark take me so much effort to do correctly on Bard that I just more or less have given up on playing the class alltogether.
But Sandrian, you say, maybe you just need to give it more time and practice more and then you’ll get better! Ofcourse that is probably the solution. The thing is, I don’t really have the time to practice the class a lot. It’s not something I would want to be doing with the sparse hours of gametime I have during the week. I want to be able to run content and not be frustrated about having to play a broken class. It’s annoying, it puts a strain on me while playing and it makes me want to throw my controller through the room. And it makes me sad, because I used to main Bard but now… It’s just a husk of it’s former glorious self.

I really hope that SE will reconsider the class design with the next big expansion. I want Bard to feel natural to me again since it is one of my favourite class types to play. I guess only time will tell.

Goals for August

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I didn’t do a goals post for July mostly because I had to work so much that gaming, or anything else for that matter, kind of got set on the backburner. Now that we have arrived in August I actually have a bit more time to play again and I dare to set a few goals again aswell.

So what do I hope to achieve in August?!

  • Upgrade my Kannagi in FFXIV. It will only take three more weekly Crystal Tower runs. I should be able to do that, right?
  • Obtain a few more Yo-Kai weapons. Doesn’t matter on which character. I just want more!
  • Level my Warrior on Sarella to 50. I’m very close and those last 5 levels should be doable, especially since I’m also running PotD on her.
  • Get atleast one PotD weapon on Sandrian. I’m doubting between Dragoon or Bard.
  • Finish off Story Mode in Kirby Planet Robobot. This also means getting all the data cubes so I will have unlocked all the extra levels in all the areas! I technically have 2 areas and two levels left for this.
  • Get rank 20 in Hearthstone. A recurring one I know. But one of the goals I set for this year was getting all the card backs.
  • Play some No Man’s Sky when it launches and write about it.
  • Legion events in WoW!

So yeah. Not that many goals, mostly becuase I’m still going to be really busy with work. Regardless of that I did torture myself for this month by signing up for Blaugust again this year. Well torture… I feel like I’ve not been posting nearly enough so I want to use Blaugust to get back into the rythm of posting regularly. So there. I’ll try to turn out a post every single day. I really hope I can do it this time, maybe even more so since it’s a “chillax” Blaugust.