A Good Vacation Start

Today kicked off my vacation and it couldn’t get off to a better start. I went to the gym first thing in the morning and have been feeling energetic all day. I played some WoW, some FFXIV and Pokémon X aswell as watch the last few episodes of Gotham I had left, which means I have finished the first season.
I haven’t felt this relaxed in a very long time and very motivated to game again. Funnily enough I decided to spend a lot of time on World of Warcraft yesterday evening and tonight. I have made some goals for WoW this month and I’m happy to report I achieved one of them today already! With a small stroke of luck I had gotten an Elixir of Rapid Experience and two Champion’s Honor’s from my missions. I sold all of those combined for about 20-25k gold and I broke the 100k gold barrier once again. I’ve been flooding the markets with a lot of other stuff I still have on my various toons (mostly crafting mats) and I’ve been raking in a lot of money. As of now I’m looking forward to getting another 800 gold just from selling Savage Bloods. It really proves that the economy on my server isn’t as dead as I thought it was. It’s certainly alive enough for me to make a nice bit of gold atleast!
100k gold! And selling more.For now I’ve mostly sent all the gold from my inactive alts to my Warrior, only really using my Priest and Paladin to generate even more revenue since they both have level 3 Garrisons and a lot of gold missions aswell as missions that give me more stuff to sell on the AH. All in all the gold flow is nice and I’m building up a nice little fortune before Legion launches.

Next to churning out gold I’ve also been doing some other things WoW related. I caught the rumour that Blizzard will be putting the Brawler’s guild on hiatus sometime before Legion launches so right now is the perfect time to start getting involved. As I’m typing up this post my Warrior is sitting on rank 5, which isn’t really that impressive. I aim to get to rank 8 in a considerable amount of time and also to complete the special brawls that I’ve unlocked by finding items throughout the game.  I really like the Brawler’s Guild so far because it makes you think about how you want to kill the bosses you’re faced with. Although some you can mostly get through with using brute force, others are a little bit more difficult and take more strategy to take down. As an added bonus when you reach rank 8 you can buy a nice Mushan Beast as mount for only 1.2k gold. Being the collector I am I obviously really want that mount so I will continue to grind on this as the month passes.

FFXIV and Pokémon X have gotten some love aswell with my MCH dinging 47 earlier today and I’ve reached the city for the second Pokémon Gym, so I should be able to cross two more goals off my list for June very soon. I’m unsure why but I’m really enjoying Pokémon X again over Blue and Alpha Sapphire. Maybe it’s because I’ve never actually finished the game so the story is fresh to me, maybe it’s because I like the setting and all the little quirks they put into the game. There are so many events and places outside of the regular “beat 8 Gyms and the Elite Four” story… You can really notice Nintendo and Game Freak wanted to show off this game as the first 3DS Pokémon game. I hope I can get to beating the second Gym and then continue on because I’ve never really gotten past it in my previous playthroughs so the game is mostly new to me anyway. It looks like I will though because I’m slightly hooked to my 3DS lately and it’s the only thing I’ve been playing outside of Blizzard games and FFXIV.

 

Gaming Goals: June

Today my vacation starts which means about 2.5 weeks of not having to even remotely think about work. I can finally turn my attention to a lot of games but also to cleaning the attic and other stuff in my room aswell as getting rid of a lot of stuff in the garden and shed. We have so much junk and it’s been annoying me since forever and now that my dad and his GF are on vacation for 5 weeks I really want to take the time to get things sorted.
I think one of the reasons I didn’t finish many things in May is because I just set goals that I wasn’t really believing in. Eventually I want to level everything in FFXIV yes, but trying to get so much stuff levelled up in a short time is just undoable. So for June I’m going to change things and focus on stuff I really WANT to complete, and not stuff I feel like I should complete.
So here is the list:

MMO Goals
Taking it a bit broader so going to share FFXIV and WoW under one category: MMO’s.

  • Level Machinist to 50 on FFXIV
  • Unlock all 3.3 content on FFXIV
  • Do the Golden Saucer event on both my Moogle and Cactuar character
  • Get 100k gold on WoW Alliance side (currently sitting on 83k)
  • Start working on the 300 toys achievement in WoW (currently sitting on 102)

Blizzard Games

  • Reach rank 20 in Hearthstone
  • Reach level 15 in Overwatch
  • Finish Chapter 4 of the Diablo Season
  • Play HotS and unlock another Hero (Lunara or Chromie)

Consoles and Handhelds

  • Defeat the second gym in Pokémon X
  • Defeat the 4th gym in Pokémon Blue
  • Play through chapter 8 and some side missions in Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright
  • Play through the House of Gales in Legend of Zelda: A Link between Worlds
  • Ratchet and Clank: PLAY IT!

This is about it. A lot less goals than in May even though I have a lot more time to play. I just really want to focus on the stuff that I enjoy right now and anything extra is a bonus. So yeah, let’s get started with June!

May Recap.

The month of May is over today and it’s time to take a look back at what I’ve actually achieved this month.

Goals for FFXIV

  • Level Monk to 50
  • Level Machinist to 50
  • Level Alchemist to 30
  • Level Armorer to 30
  • Level Blacksmith to 30
  • Level Culinarian to 30
  • Level Goldsmith to 30
  • Level Leatherworker to 30
  • Level Fisher to 30
  • Level Miner to 30
  • Finish Scholar 2.0 Relic Zenith
  • Finish Monk 2.0 Relic Zenith

Unfortunately I spent a lot less time playing FFXIV than I would have thought. With work being seriously overwhelming, me starting a new training regime and picking up a few new and very addicting games I actually only completed one goal this month, and that is level Goldsmith to level 30. I have barely touched any other crafters unfortunately, but I did level my Monk and Machinist. My Monk is currently sitting at level 40, where my Machinist has dinged 46 yesterday. All in all I made some progress and actually am not that far off level 50 on atleast the Machinist. Seeing as I have a nice vacation coming up I think I’ll be spending a bit more time in FFXIV so I’ll keep the goals I set for May and just push them over to June.

Goals for Blizzard Games

  • Get rank 20 in Hearthstone
  • Finish second wing of League of Explorers
  • Unlock third wing of League of Explorers
  • Finish Diablo 3 chapter 4 for the season
  • Play Overwatch! (I got early acces to open beta)

Other Goals

  • Finish reading Illidan
  • Finish watching Gotham season 1
  • Defeat second and third Gyms in Pokémon Blue
  • Play through two additional worlds/mission clusters in Ratchet and Clank
  • Wrap up some personal stuff related to University.

I got rank 20 in Hearthstone pretty fast with the release of the Old Gods expansion and also took the time to play through the second wing of LoE so that’s done. I’m still trying to unlock the third wing, but all in good time. I played less Overwatch than I thought, mostly due to being seriously tired. I did get some time in and am played about 5-6 games since launch. I’m still trying out a lot of the roster available and am mostly playing one or two games inbetween other activities as a sort of distraction.
I started out strong in Diablo last month, but unfortunately fell into the “I’m bored of grinding” after only a day or two. I do want to complete chapter 4 for the goodies, so I’ll try to focus on that next month.
As far as my other goals go. I read through Illidan pretty fast and really enjoyed the book. I’m way past the Third Gym in Pokémon Blue now (yay for playing on the train) and I’m over halfway with watching Gotham so I have been doing a lot outside of games. Unfortunately I was just too tired to do much of anything else so a lot of these goals will probably get dragged over to June aswell. I’ll see. I’m looking at what games I’m currently playing and enjoying and probably frame my June goals around that.
I’m a bit disappointed by the fact that I couldn’t do nearly as much as I’d hoped, but well, feeling tired a lot kind of takes away from gaming.

The Backlog part 3.1: Oldschool Handhelds

A few weeks ago I did a backlog post of my current games on my current generation consoles/handhelds and PC. In the first post I promised I’d also do a backlog of all my older games, to show you all the collection I built up over the years and to sketch how my gaming habits and ownership has changed over the years. Seeing as my oldschool backlog is quite big I’m splitting it up into two or three separate posts, the first of which will be today and will cover my gaming career on handhelds.
So without further ado, let’s start with the first 10 years of my life in gaming which was dominatied mostly by Nintendo and their Gameboys.
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As you can see I have a reasonable collection of Gameboy games. I tried to divide them up by placing them under the type of Gameboy that was needed to play them, hence the “weird” row placements. I started out with a Gameboy Pocket and Pokémon Blue when I was about eight or nine years old. Pokémon was all the rage at the time and a lot of my friends were playing with Gameboys. Add up the fact that we would travel to birthdays and family a lot during the weekends, and those drives would take 1-2 hours every time, my parents decided to get me a Gameboy to keep me busy in the car and at some family events where I would be the only kid. I can’t even begin to describe how many hours I played on that thing and of all the games you see in the left row there’s literally three I haven’t 100% completed. These are Super Mario Land 1, Kirby’s Dream World and Bugs Bunny. I’m pretty sure you couldn’t really complete the Bugs Bunny game though, it was kind of like pacman where levels just got gradually harder untill you died. Super Mario Land didn’t have a save option so although I’ve played it a lot I could never get to the endboss of the game in one go. Kirby is actually a game I picked up way later and played for a bit, but never completed. I think I spent the most time on my Pokémon games. As you can see I own a lot of them (the only Gameboy game I actually lack is Pokémon Leafgreen, which I did own but gave to an ex-boyfriend as birthday present). Unfortunately Silver and Gold no longer work due to empty battery, but I don’t want to know how many hours I’ve sunk into all of those games.
The Gameboy Color generation was next and there I’ve only not completed Hamtaro (I remember being quite far in though) and Animorphs. Animorphs I didn’t really understand, but I’m willing to pick it up again. The Tetris game was more one for my mom to play with and I believe she still has the high score on that particular cassette so I don’t really want to touch it.
I got my Gameboy Advance SP after my mom passed away. I’ve played with this for about 5 years untill I bought my DS Lite. Unfortunately I’m missing two games on this picture which I think I left at my ex’s place and thus will never see again. I managed to rebuy Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories but I’m still looking for the original Sonic Advance to complete my collection. I’m also considering getting Pokémon Leafgreen again just so I have all the old Gameboy generations complete. I have completed less of those games than on previous generations. I gamed less during highschool and only got introduced to WoW when I was 17 and that took up so much time that I didn’t really look at my handhelds anymore. I did complete quite a few games, most notably the Pokémon games and the Crash Bandicoot games. I do intend to go back and play through the rest, starting with my recently re-obtained Kingdom Hearts game.

On to the next generation!

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When I was about 18 I bought my first Nintendo DS with my own money. Although I never really acquired that many games for it, I think I had enough to keep me busy for a while. I bought it when it was out for quite a bit already and the bundle came with Need for Speed Most wanted (which I completed) and Fifa 06 (which I honestly didn’t touch at all). Again I have  quite a few Pokémon games and I have completed all of them except Diamond, which I didn’t acquire untill much later. Children of Mana was a game which I played a whole lot aswell, it was very grindy and hard but fun to play. I don’t think I’ve defeated the last boss so technically not completed, but boy the amount of hours I sunk into that. Zoo Tycoon was very much a nostalgia buy and I played around with it for a bit. Nintendogs was just plain cute and I did unlock a lot of puppies, but eventually my enthusiasm for the game died down. Sonic Rush was a gift from my ex and Bleach I had to buy as fangirl, neither games I have completed though.
Kawasaki’s More Braintraining was very hip at the time so I obviously had to have it, and I did use it a lot. As far as Final Fantasy III goes. I do remember playing a bit of it, but I never finished that one either. The only thing on this picture that I really regret buying is the Nintendo DS Browser. Before the smartphone area Nintendo offered a way to use the internet on your DS. I bought it and used it a bit but in hindsight it was a real waste of money. Oh well, you can’t buy awesome things all the time right?

I hope you guys liked looking at my “oldschool” handheld collection. I have actually completed a lot of these games, especially the Gameboy and Pokémon ones. I think it’s due to being a kid and not having that much money to spend on yourself. I would only get new games when I had saved up enough pocket money to buy one or when it was my birthday or a special occassion. I guess lack of choice makes you appreciate more what you have and actually play it fully before moving on to another game. Now that I have more money to spend, and I like getting my hands on new shinies, I get new games almost every month, which distracts me from the game I was currently playing. This buying habit, combined to looking back at my old games and the amount I actually completed has more or less woken me up and strengthened my resolve not to buy that many games anymore and focus on completing the ones I already have.

In my next and (hopefully) last backlog post I’ll take a look at my two old consoles: The Playstation 2 and the Sega Genesis. Stay tuned!

No Overwatch?

Honestly on launch day I can’t really ignore the fact that Overwatch is now officially playable. I dipped my toes in earlier this evening after dinner, but a pounding head and an overwhelming desire to sleep drove me away from the game to relaxation instead. Trying to learn new heroes and staying with the pace of the game while also trying to not fall asleep in my chair wasn’t really doable, so I’ll probably play some more over the week and then talk a bit more about it aswell.
Instead I want to talk a bit about Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright.

A local multimedia store had a nice sale going this week. Buy three games and only pay for two. I took this opportunity to nab a copy of Mario Kart 8 and Super Mario 3D World for my WiiU but also my very first Fire Emblem game. I have heard a lot about the series and they seem to have gotten positive reviews, plus I have a serious weakness for JRPG graphics in a game so I got the last nudge I needed to pick up the game and experience what it’s all about. I picked Birthright because apparently it’s the easier of the two latest Fire Emblem games that are out now. I plopped the game into my 3DS last night and played for a bit before hopping onto FFXIV for my roulettes. I’ve also played a bit on the train to work this morning and on the way back home and I think I’m done with the prologue/tutorial part, which takes about 1.5 hours to complete. I unlocked my castle and built my first building and now I’m kind of poking around what exactly I need to be doing to advance in the game. I think I’ll need multiple playthroughs in this game to begin with because the game lets you choose multiple storylines and I kind of want to explore them all… But let’s just start with the one I chose: the Hoshido story. I play the game on Classic mode since that is apparently how it’s meant to be played and I managed to already get two of my dudes killed off so that’s a good start, right?!
So far the story is a bit thin but the graphics and music of the game are absolutely stunning. I haven’t been able to skip a single cutscene just because how breathtaking the design of this game looks. I like how you can customize your character up to a point and how they allow you to switch your hairstyle halfway through the game. As said I’m only 1.5 hours in so I can’t really comment too much on the game yet, but it looks to be an epic experience and I’ve currently set aside all my other handheld games to play it.

From what I understood the story of this game is cut up in three separate games so if I would want to experience it fully I’d need to get my hands on the other two paths aswell. However since this is my first game and I’m not sure how much I like the franchise yet I think I’ll stick to finishing Birthright first, and then I can always look into getting Conquest and/or Revelations later. Maybe Nintendo will let us purchase the other paths for cheaper when the games are out longer. Who knows. For now though the game has really captivated me and I want to know how the story unfolds and how bad (or good) I really am at the strategy parts of this game.

Vacation Inbound
My two-and-a-half weeks off are getting closer and closer aswell. With officially only 5 days of work still ahead of me I can feel my body ache for some nice relaxing time off. My vacation starts on June 2nd and I won’t have to go back to work untill June 20th. The idea of having 18 days off is seriously amazing and I’ve also booked a 4-day citytrip to Lisbon to get me out of the country and the house for a bit. I hope I can use this time to sort through a lot of junk on the attic and in the shed, tie up loose ends in my life, work out a lot and maybe finish a game or two that I have bought over the years. It’s just a really nice feeling to not have any obligations or alarm clocks in my life for a bit and that I finally can spend my time the way I want to without feeling guilty, because next to having 18 days off I also have the house to myself. My father and his girlfriend are going on vacation to Canada for almost 5 weeks, and I will have the house and car to myself for that time. So yay for me!
As for the rest of this week, I’m going to be very busy so I doubt I can get much gaming hours in. I do hope to push my Machinist to level 50 though with my Monk trailing not that far behind. But Overwatch will dominate my free time the most.

Two Sides

As far as I can remember I’ve been fairly lucky when it comes to the gaming community as a whole. I’ve always been in friendly environments with overall nice guilds, nice people and nice servers. From the moment I set foot in WoW untill today I can honestly say that I’ve never experienced extreme toxicity, harassment or other negative experiences in the games that I play. Ofcourse there are some games where toxicity is unavoidable, MOBA types like League of Legends are one of the most notorious for this, but I’ve always tried to stay clean of that and if there was negative stuff in my games I just stepped away.
I think the “worst” experience I had online was with guys who couldn’t take a hint about me not being interested in them and they would stick around and be annoying for a little bit too long. In the end I either had to have a firm talk with them or just put them on ignore and they wouldn’t bother me anymore. All in all I’ve been lucky I guess.
It also helps that I’m not famous in any way. Most likely because I can’t commit to a game to become good enough to compete with the top people in that game, and that’s fine by me. I like poking about on my own or with a group of friends, just having fun and doing random things. That’s why I don’t hardcore ladder in Hearthstone or do ranked games in League of Legends. The only game in which I tend to tryhard and achieve stuff is Heroes of the Storm, and I am actually planning to actively ladder up when the season starts. Other than that though, I play relatively safe games where the only thing you have to deal with sometimes is DPS elitists, but even they are starting to become a rare breed.

However…
Over the past weekend I’ve seen how truly toxic the gaming community can be. One of my favourite casters from League of Legends has gotten into trouble because of false allegations aimed at him personally. Very long story short, a streamer accused said caster of pedophilia for no apparent reason other than to create drama. Although he retracted the accusations the damage has already been done and Krepo has been dealing with the fallout ever since. This happened about a month ago after I visited the League of Legends playoffs in Rotterdam.
Fast forward to the present. Caster X has been streaming for the past few days, a mix of League of Legends and Digimon. The Digimon streams were small and fun, lots of viewer interaction and all in all quite positive. The moment he goes back to streaming League of Legends though, the jerks appear. Constantly reminding him of the false allegations, calling him out, trolling him in Twitch chat, on social media, via messages on Snapchat and Facebook. It’s gotten so bad that they tell him to go kill himself followed by “haha joking”. I can only imagine how tough it must be to deal with this on a daily basis and when things got too much for him yesterday he quit his stream and annouced he’d go blackscreen for quite a while.
As a fan and as a human being this saddens me. No one would have to deal with this amount of harassment and I can honestly not understand why people would do this to someone. I’ve seen some toxic behaviour already but this just overshadows everything I have ever encountered. People seem to enjoy bringing him down and I just can’t seem to grasp why. If it were only a handful of people doing this it’s one thing, but when it’s tons of people every single day it turns into something much more serious.
Suddenly the positive gaming community, the community I have always called my second home that was and is filled with nice people has turned a very very dark page. I guess there is always two sides to everything, but in this case I feel like Pandora’s Box has been opened and there is no way to close it anytime soon. It also makes me very sad that it gives the League of Legends community, and the gamer community in a broader sense, bad rep. All these people identify as “gamer” in one way or another and it just adds negativity to the tag. It only strengthens the stereotypes where gamers are kids and ragers and where gaming is bad for you and turns you into horrible people.
This has also shaken my core belief that people all have some good in them. Seeing people revel in someone else’s misery, seeing them make light and fun of serious accusations and seeing them just absolutely ruin someone’s day and maybe even career just for fun… I just can’t deal with it properly. My heart bleeds and I’m upset and angry at these people. I don’t think they feel empathy of any kind, if they are willing to be like this. But honestly what can I really do about it?

I guess this is the price you pay for being “famous”. People like bringing you down because of jealousy or malice and whenever a juicy drama occurs people are eager to jump into it. You see it happen with the normal athletes. With people from Hollywood and now also within E-Sports.
It does make me wish I could somehow punch them though.

Setting a Baseline

So I went in for the first session with a personal trainer yesterday. Initially it was only meant to be an intake conversation but due to him having enough time, and me being there anyway, we decided to do the first session right then and there… And boy was I sore all over. Today the muscle aches and pains seem to have subsided a bit, except for my shoulder area which still hurts quite a lot.
To establish a baseline for me to work from he needed some info about my age, weight, height and ofcourse the resulting BMI. I’m on a BMI of 28 which means I am overweight, but not obese. It’s not the worst out there but ofcourse I want to be closer to 23 or 24 which is more or less ideal. After talking for a bit, establishing what I wanted from him and why and how, we started doing some exercises so he could see “how I move”. I found this to be a bit of an odd term, but now I understand it completely.
Basically it comes down to seeing how I use the muscles in every part of my body and from there see which are the problem areas that need the most work. He asked me what personally bothered me the most and for me it’s the area right below my shoulderblades. Due to excess weight hanging in the front I always need to “compensate” my stance with my shoulders and I definately noticed when he started poking and prodding the area there. Next to that we found out that the muscles in my left leg are much stronger than in my right and that I have “core muscle” problems, like most people that sit all day do, which means my back, butt and hips are much too weak to offer proper support. What was also an uncharacteristic issue was the fact that the muscles in my calves are always tensed, even when I’m not actually tensing them. He was unsure what caused this, but it would explain why I often get pain in my calves when I walk for a while.
All in all I think I had a good evaluation and we ended with doing some exercises that train about 70% of the muscle mass that is a problem area for me. Now that I’m sitting at home though I can really feel the fallout of this “light” training, and although pain and soreness is usually a good sign, I worry if I’m able to get out of bed tomorrow!
My next training appointment is in a week and then we are really going to establish a routine for me to follow that optimizes both muscle growth (and thus make it so I burn more fat) and fat reduction at the same time. No this doesn’t mean I aim to get ripped, but muscle mass makes it so you burn more calories during the day. Which is good when you want to lose weigh

Catching up on Pokemon
So I’ve been playing a lot of Pokémon Blue lately but I also have other games in the series that I have left unfinished. As you can see in my widget bar I am trying to finish atleast Alpha Sapphire right now, but I’m quite lost as to where I should go. I am 6 badges and about 12 hours play in and I know I need to teach Surf to one of my Pokémon so I can advance and start working towards getting Kyogre. I’m kind of bummed though because I already picked a Water Pokémon as my starter, which kind of renders Kyogre useless. I could reset if I wanted to, but with all the promotional Pokémon I have obtained over the past two years I really don’t want to, so I’ll just chug along the game and not use Kyogre in my team I guess.
I know there are ample guides online for almost every game in existence, I prefer playing without them though. I like figuring stuff out on my own, even if it means not 100% completing a game. It’s how I’ve always done things, the trial and error way. However in this case I think I’ll look up an Alpha Sapphire guide and retrace my steps a bit, just so I can advance in the game and the story again.
I really want 2016 to be a year where I actually finish off games, instead of just expanding my collection and not touching half of the things I own. So I’m working towards a lot and use guides and tools a bit more to help me along the way. Ofcourse I want to do most of it on my own, but sometimes a little help is needed. I’ll keep you guys updated on how my playthroughs of various games go! It might not be a separate topic for me to write on, but I will include it in some of my posts.

Weird Evening

Yesterday I went through my Twitter followers on a whim. I had noticed the bot spam and I figured I’d root out all the crap from my account. I swear Twitter bots are a huge annoying thing and count for about 10% of my follower list. I can only imagine the people with thousands of followers and how many bots are among those.
Anyway, I went through my follower list and got hit hard by a few people I still saw on there. I have been active on Twitter for quite a while now, I think since WotLK  in WoW, which is around the time I started to blog a bit here and there aswell. Let’s just keep it at 6 years of Twitter activity. Back in the early days there were a lot of WoW blogs out there, Righteous Orbs, Cynwise’s Warlock Manual and the Barrens Chat. I name these blogs for a reason seeing as I got confronted with still having Ercles and Wulfy among my followers. Ercles unfortunately passed away in 2010 and seeing his name again made me swallow hard. The same goes for Tiny Tori who passed away around this time last year and Cynwise who said goodbye to the gaming community in 2014. These are all people I have interacted with at one time or another. All good folk with a passion for gaming. And they are all a part of me one way or another.
I got quite emotional seeing some of these people who aren’t around anymore, and I wasn’t really prepared for this either. I didn’t know I’d be so impacted by things that were, but apparently the past comes up to bite you in the ass sometimes, and that’s ok. Ercles and Tori deserve to be remembered and a part of the community still misses Cynwise and the awesome guys from Righteous Orbs.

All emotional stuff aside, I’m quite looking forward to starting my training. I really hope that with some help I can reach my goals this time and stop feeling bad health wise and also about the way I look. I’ve also thought up a proper reward for when I do get close to reaching my goal: travel to Berlin for a weekend and visit the LCS studio’s. I really loved the atmosphere of the LCS playoff finals in Rotterdam and even though there are obviously less people in the studio, I hope to recapture that atmosphere again there. Plus it might give me some time to talk to some of the casters instead of just getting 20 seconds to take a picture and then having to leave again.
I’m a huge fan of the LCS and the whole show surrounding it plus I may or may not have a slight crush on one of the casters, so it would be awesome if I would be able to strike up a conversation with him. Seeing as I’m already more or less in touch with said person I hope he doesn’t mind some small talk IRL either.

FFXIV and Timezone Woes
I’ve been trying to reach my goals like a good little girl when it comes to FFXIV but I notice heavily that I’m slowly getting bored of the game again. Not that I don’t like leveling, but more that I don’t have anything to do besides leveling. And I’m starting to notice.

Due to not having a proper raidgroup on Moogle I just miss out on a lot of things. Not only progress wise, but also fun/casual wise. I haven’t touched a Pony Farm group yet and as DPS they are actually quite hard to find. Add up that my friends list is more or less barren and I can only really ask 2-3 people to come farm with me and you can see the issue.
I really wish I had some more motivation to keep on logging and playing. I’m missing the sense of community a lot and I feel a bit lost within my current FC. Although I have been around there since forever there has been such a huge flow of people coming and going that I never really get to “befriend” anyone within the timeframe that I play. I’d love to switch over to Cactuar and be more active in Greysky Armada, but the timezone thing is just seriously terrible. The hours the guild is alive there are the middle of the night for me and when I’m online during the week everyone is still at work. I guess during the weekends it’s not that horrible, but if the people you want to play with are 6-10 hours behind you timewise… It gets a bit tough. And it’s such a shame because I would love to play with Chestnut and Belghast to name a few examples… Bluh. Life isn’t fair I guess. It’s also one of the main reasons I never stuck around in Wildstar. All the awesome folk I want to play with are NA based and well, I’m not.
I guess it’s the bane of any person who is in touch with people all over the world. Maybe if I didn’t have a fulltime job I could turn around my sleep schedule, but alas, that is not going to work. So for now I’m just playing on EU based servers with EU based people… Atleast the ones that are still around.

A Breath of Air

Yesterday evening I had invited myself over to a friend’s house on a whim for today. We met eachother through gaming and it’s always nice to spend a day with a fellow geek that loves games and anything games related as much as you do. He asked me to bring over my copy of Bravely Default so he could see what it was about, seeing as he was thinking of picking up the sequel. In return I nabbed his copy of “Ocarina of Time 3D” so I can play even more Zelda games than I’m already doing.
Speaking of Zelda, I’ve been poking around in “A Link Between Worlds” and am currently at my second dungeon, the House of Gales. I saved just before so I haven’t really peeked in yet but so far I’m enjoying the game. I have a little witch who flies me everywhere and I can rent any weapon I want, which ofcourse is super neat. I’m also carrying around monster guts. No idea what purpose they serve but hey, I’ll figure it out sooner or later. I do like the Zelda games. I’ve never really been into them as kid, but now I can appreciate the line of games a lot. They all tell a nice story and the Action oriented RPG is a nice breath of relief after being used to playing games like Pokémon and Final Fantasy, which are all turn based when it comes to fighting stuff.
I hope I can push through on LBW so I can start OoT, which apparently is one of the better installments in the series. That will also probably help me understand Majora’s Mask better.

As me and my friend were hanging out at his room and PC he decided to fire up Witcher 1 and play some. Having bought Witcher 3 myself I do know the series, but I never played enough to really get into anything. Not long after playing we came to the conclusion that Witcher 1 basically evolves around having sex with people, getting drunk and killing stuff. Ofcourse this is more hilarious to play together while commenting on what decisions to take and to try and find out which ladies we could talk into bed. We managed to woo some kind of princess by feeding her raw meat but other than that no one seemed to be really interested.
We laughed hard though at all the options in the game, and although it may not look that good graphics wise it’s still a seriously good game, firing up the desire within me to pick up my copy of Witcher 3 again and give it another go. The problem is that right now I have so many games to divide myself between that I don’t think it’s the best idea if I do that, but my interest in playing is certainly back.

In other news. I’m back on Azeroth.
I had gotten my tax money back last week and figured ah what the heck, I’ll buy a WoW sub. With Legion coming out in about 3 months time I’ll have enough time to earn some gold before it actually hits. Or well “earn”. Basically abuse the Garrison mission system while it’s still in place. It’s nice to just log in and do my daily gold stuff and log out again. When I feel like it I log in for a bit longer and farm some old raids for mounts that I haven’t obtained yet (I’m looking at you Invincible) and sell the gear, which in turn makes me money. It’s a nice thing to do and WoW has been, and always shall be, my comfort game. I’ll mostly be online after work just sorting out missions etc, so I don’t think it’ll take away too much of time from FFXIV which I still see as my main MMO for now.
I do kind of feel like the spark to game and get stuff done is slowly getting back to me again and it’s a very nice mood to be in. Coupled with my team coordinator being back again at work and me starting a rigorous training this Thursday to finally lose weight I can only say I’m feeling really positive at the moment. And I hope I can hold on to this feeling for a while.

Random Sunday Post

I’ve been struggling a bit today about what I wanted to write.
After watching the finals of the Mid Season Invitationals of League of Legends this morning I wanted to talk about the e-sports scene and how Korea seems to be miles ahead of the rest of us, and why this influences games in general.
Then after reading Belghasts post about being burned out on blogging, after an earlier post by him earlier in the week about being burned out on MMO’s, I wanted to write a bit about that subject aswell. Not that I’m burned out on blogging myself, au contraire, I have so many things I still want to talk about, they are just not necessarily all game related.
A few hours later I read a tweet by one of the LoL shoutcasters I follow and I wanted to write about how it must be the weirdest experience ever to get famous with games and have thousands of fans (and haters). How to deal with all of it and how happy I am to be relatively anonymous.

Yet I just can’t seem to find the right words to fit these topics. I’m struggling to grasp the essence to what I really want to say, and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because they are all subjects that are hard to deal with, maybe because there are some other more important things I want to talk about first. I don’t really know.
All I know is that there are a lot of things happening right now that I just can’t really seem to grasp and thus I’m not sure on how to write about these things either. The ideas are there, however I can’t seem to put my words properly on paper.
Perhaps this is the true essence of having a so called “writer’s block?”.