Categories
Gaming

Repairing Tech Fun

Bought my eldest a broken Xbox Elite Controller for his console as a gift £35 plus postage and then another £5 in parts from Aliexpress to fix it, had a worn d-pad and a mangled headset input, he didnt need the headset input repaired as he has the xbox bluetooth headset but I figured it was a 50p part and it might as well be replaced, gave everything board related a clean with ispropyl alcohol as well to be safe while it was apart.

All fixed up and tested, no drift and as it was already a custom controller it has a nice pattern and paint job on it, hes happy and I am as I got to repair electronics again.

Overall a nice find and a good repair.

Categories
Gaming

Sunset on WoW?

Garrosh Hellscream

I quit again over a month ago for what I feel will be the third and final time, I tried and tried to enjoy the game recently and the hype of DF, but the FOMO couldn’t take hold with this game anymore like it used to with me.

I tried alliance characters and guilds, my horde guild which I wasn’t bothered enough to commit to raiding in were just raid logging and all quit after they cleared Heroic Raid and got their KSM sorted as is the game these days and I realised I wasn’t playing for anything or enjoying it anymore.

The games become very formulaic, the latest patch now is always a new area which is a variant of the timeless isle model to grind out, World bosses, Catch up Gear, Reputation and currencies aren’t fun things to keep going for, even though Blizz have made a lot of improvements to the casual side of the game in all fairness I genuinely think after 17 years of playing that I have outgrown it finally.

There are some aspects I still like but I can keep up with them outside of playing, namely the art of the game and the community art along with the lore and story, I can’t say ill never play the game again as I’ve given up and returned before, but for now I don’t think ill be back for the foreseeable as I see it.

Categories
Gaming

Boredom is hard work

I am at an awkward age now, Gaming isn’t sustaining me anymore so fully and I am looking at different hobbies over the last couple of years so far its been the following –

Model Painting – having fun with a large space marine figure I’m refining still, struggling my abilities on a couple of 32mm miniatures I bought even with a massive magnifier too, I have convinced myself I can paint Bob Ross style too in the near future

Lockpicking – stumbled across and started watching Locking Picking Lawyer on YouTube about 2 years back, bought a starter kit on amazon and been having a go at locks ever since, surprisingly fine and fun skill to learn

Electronic Repair – again YouTube led, watching Northridgefix and Tronicsfix and other restoration sites, have taken up soldering and managed to repair my son’s game controller so far with relative ease and im looking for cheap eBay repairs at present

Watch Repair – This is the next one im trying, ive been watching wristwatch revival and I have a couple of broken decent quartz watches to repair and replace the seals and batteries on and I am also looking to pickup a mechanical on eBay to repair and service

Categories
Gaming

New Toy – RPi 4 4GB

I already have a Pi3 and its got a decent Retropie setup going on there for a couple of years now which the kids love, So I went out and bought one of these upgraded pi4s about 4 months ago now to see if it can be a viable desktop computer, I tried desktop usage on the 3, but found it a little slow and sluggish even with a lightweight distribution.

I managed to get hold of a 4GB device after camping out the https://rpilocator.com/ website for about 3 weeks prior until they came back into stock in the UK, I even ordered the basic case and the new usb-c based PSU and a HDMI adapter for its new micro-hdmi connectors.

I found that it was running a little hot when using the basic case as it was acting like an insulator for the pi and its board, I started seeing some telltale signs of white dots on the screen when the temperature was raised on the desktop, so I set about getting a fan and more open case as shown in the picture.

The Pi 4GB with the newer case I bought and Fan

In terms of desktop, its a beast compared to the previous model, I was initially using the default debian based installation, before distro hopping it out and switching it out to an XFCE Manjaro build which seemed to be more my preference, though recently again I jumped ship and now run the same as my desktop – Endeavour OS and it serves perfectly as a low powered portable desktop PC at home as a result.

Its fast and responsive and very low powered compared to the 750w PSU my main gaming PC utilises a very impressive device.

Categories
Gaming

Gaming Update

FFXIV

I was having a break from the game but resubscribed recently, I was getting too frustrated before trying to level other jobs up in the game, its a much slower process than other MMOs, you don’t have the option to repeat the MSQ and all of the other avenue’s take a long time to get the numbers up.

I have got my Astrologian stuck on 70+, Gunbreaker on 60+ and Red Mage is 60ish, Dancer is 66 all the guides I’ve followed seem to be slower than it makes out considerably but I am levelling up my char as the dancer class now and its going OK as I am prepared and taking my time.

Garad my FFXIV main with pet and his Chakrams

Lost Ark

I jumped on the game as it got its western release and I liked it and I’ve struggled with it in equal measure, struggling with it largely because of the weird feeling of it being such a small screen that I am playing on, diablo 3 felt like it was giving you a much larger screen estate than this, the game is undeniably fun though like diablo 3, its probably better than that playing wise with the fact you can run around with massive swords dishing out the punishment to hordes of mobs.

New World

Weirdly I reinstalled this and logged back on after some free twitch giveaways recently, it seems they have fixed a lot of the game breaking bugs finally though it looks like the damage has been done when I noticed that there has been a massive of consolidation of the servers done now to accommodate the smaller player base, its lost about 99.7% of the player base now and I don’t expect it to limp on more than another year unless there are some serious whales buying up the shop items all the time or they do a massive relaunch, its shameful what this game has become really.

Hargen my new world main with his runic bear gear

WoW

I came back to the game for a short while after seeing the Zereth Mortis hype and the fact that ABK had made a lot of the badly needed QoL changes and had a play on a few characters, Chamber is a dying sickly realm that needs to be merged, they won’t do a consolidation though as they would have to admit their numbers have tanked then.

I am struggling with it still, I am in a now hibernating guild on a dead realm where everyone else has just progressed to KSM and playing the bare minimum raid logging before hibernating it doesn’t make for fun when your looking for a minor amount of socialising within a guild for me, so ive decided to up sticks level up and try another realm for myself where I am not the only one online in a guild.

I will always enjoy this game and what it gave me over the years but it no longer has that super serious hold on me as it has in the past which can only be a good thing.

Gozar the Zandalari Paladin with his Ravencrest set and Arc Shield
Categories
Gaming Personal Wellbeing

Hobbytime

This Christmas I decided to take up a new hobby as a means of passing the time and trying to find something therapeutic, despite having zero artistic ability or vision unlike my mother and sister, I have decided to take up painting, this is going to be painting up models initially and possibly canvas later on seeing if Bob Ross stuff actually works for me.

I initially tried painting 3″ miniatures and had a couple of false starts there as I didn’t have modelling paintbrushes fine enough to begin with and also had a silk style paint, not a matt, so everything looked super shiny and plastic when painted.

My wife picked me up a big Warhammer Space Marine which I’ve started painting the last month and managed to get its first coat finished in a very rough manner which I will start to today up in the coming weeks now it has a healthy base coat in place.

Next stage is to tidy it up with some masking taped cover to sharpen edges and areas and get a second coat in place on the model, if i’m feeling brave enough then i’ll be adding in shading before a varnish.

Categories
Gaming

Moving on from New World

Game is just too much of a mess for me

I levelled to 60 in game and I do enjoy the game as well, I have played it solid for a month now quite hardcore, but I’ve come to the conclusion now that the game is in too much of a broken state to really continue and its sapped my enjoyment of it now by turning it into frustation.

I am finding myself like I was in WoW, logging in and running around my home town until I can see the odd group I can join, the company I joined after my transfer to Bifrost started well but seems to have died the last week as the governor went inactive and there was barely any activity so I left it too sadly which only made me realise a bit more how I was playing the game same as WoW logging in and not doing much.

I tried every spec before I left and every facet to know its not for me now in its current state, PvP feels broken and a mix of “Geared” and “Ungeared people” if your like me in the ungeared you just get smashed to bits easy, even worse in a BG like OPR you basically get hit by a musket and half healthed as it hits for 4k+ and you can then basically tickle them back for about 1k if your lucky as they have the gear to prevent damage.

Off into the sunset I travel sadly

In regards to PvE I have half levelled some of the crafting which offers me nothing on my character other than salvage materials, it was too easy in the game to get ahead of the gear you can craft when levelling and the material amounts for crafting are badly broken in my opinion, the fact that AGS restructured the material amounts now mid live game to punitively punish people trying to get their skills levelled has been too much for me to stomach, why make it harder for people who took their time levelling and punish them ? they should have just made the next tier go in the new direction and not punish the existing players.

The mob health level has been changed now and is absolutely ridiculous at 60 and the game chucking very few quests your way which are then basically elite group quests that you cannot do solo no matter how hard you want to, as theres mobs there which are too problematic like elite vines everywhere, to make it even worse their recent “improvements” change the mobs at the top end to be basically massive HP sponges that you have to beat up surrounded by more minor mobs that will respawn too fast around them now.

Its a real shame now how the game has gone, its sad seeing AGS make mistakes along the acti-blizz path where they have a forum full of feedback telling them how bad the changes are and they then decide to plough on with bad changes anyway, I don’t want to go down the WoW route again so unfortunately I am bailing now and I am going to be returning to FFXIV and having a new go at that, which has started captivating me to be fair, I didn’t want to go this way, but New World is set on a path which is going to basically repeat other MMO mistakes as I see it now and I can’t subject myself to that sadly.

Categories
Gaming

FFXIV – An MMO Player Reborn

I started playing this on and off during New World and towards the recent end of WoW for me, after hitting 60 on that game I struggled to get groups and found myself a bit bored and frustrated, New World became exactly the same with nothing to do with a job to complete if you wanted to go do a dungeon, so I downloaded the free trial and started playing FFXIV online too as well, I initially had a Hrothgar that I deleted before settling on an elezen.

My first impressions were not superb, I didn’t gel with the game in the beginning and found myself being a bit frustrated, comparing it all to WoW, when I shook off taking that stance and shackles and pushed through, I found myself starting to really enjoy the game, I picked an Archer being a Hunter in WoW and didn’t realise or know much about the progression of jobs within the game, it was actually quite fun being completely new to something after all these years, knowing one MMO meant you know nothing of other ones I found.

When I eventually worked out the game and roughly how to go about levelling, I fully started to immerse myself into the games main scenario quests and the job quests, what unfolded to me at that point was thoroughly absorbing, I noticed immediately the cut scenes and voice acting within the game and found it drawing me into the characters and their development, in WoW characters tend to be established by the lore and your basically a passenger along for the ride with certain lore based NPCs, in FF you basically develop alongside the characters as you go along with the other NPCs, I found myself at the mid point of the first expansion a realm reborn in no time with my Archer making the job leap to Bard.

I found as an even bigger bonus that players in this game the deeper I got how much nicer and lower in toxicity the player base is within this game, my first forays into dungeons and trials were really nice and enjoyable and people don’t get abusive from mistakes at all by comparison in this game at the normal level, no one leaves on wipes or calls you shit if you mess up, its infinitely more forgiving.

I hit the end of ARR I thought as credits played then and discovered I was only half the way through as there was a wealth of further questions to take place after that before getting onto heavensward

Categories
Gaming

(A whole) New World

First Impressions

I was impressed by the game after watching some streams on twitch, it looks fresh and different to WoW which I recently quit, I deep dived into it with a work colleague and spent the first week of the game largely queuing my way into the game which was a sign of its popularity while they sorted the queuing out and other teething issues like random crashes, initially it was fairly action packed and filled with stuff to do, it has to be said though, that thinned out a lot above 50 though which ill come back to later.

Some of the sculpted areas you walk through

I enjoy the open world interactive nature of this game, its much more free flowing than wow was, the world is beautiful and much more interactive tying in with the skills your character develops as it interacts with the game world to advance them, logging being an example, to level that you need to largely deforest a massive amount of the map repeatedly, it feeds in to other skills a lot more though in all fairness with the wood that you supply as you go along.

The game has issues at the moment and it does need more polish thats unmistakably obvious with the recent “trading post not paying you for your sold trades while your offline” bug they introduced in a fix patch inadvertently.

Beautiful imagery in game

I have yet to finish levelling as I’m on 57 atm and basically its confined me to two areas for questing, one controlled by my faction the Syndicate, though they haven’t put any projects to go in the Ebonscale area of the map so im restricted pretty much to quests giving 1200 xp which means its going very slowly and repetitively, I need to get through the Destiny shipyard expedition too, but ive waited until I hit 55 for that and I havent seen any groups so far for it, im also switched from my strength/constitution build to an dexterity/constitution one now ive levelled the hatchet and Warhammer to 20 and ive gone Bow/Spear which im enjoying.

That being said, theres a lot of stuff needing fixing at the moment, while I will say I am enjoying it and its playable to a degree.

blue quests on the right hand side showing the repeatable quests having to be done to level

I’m actually wondering why Amazon chose to release the game in this state, the barebones is ok, I haven’t bothered with PVP as experience dictates in the past that if you come across people more levelled than you they just steamroll you down but people are often discussing the major bugs that exist at the moment in Reddit/NW Forums and in game itself, the output rush game is bugged. Theres a shortage of PvE quests in the game, after you hit 45 it really thins out the questing and you struggle for content, I am at the moment doing my syndicate faction quests in an area and trying to do town hall upgrades, though none of the controlling companies are bothering with any of them to make it a bit harder on everyone else.

The plot so far doesn’t really make major sense though I am only about halfway through it though at this point, it basically pushes you through dungeons so far. The game suffers from a lack of differential of mob types either, at the moment it seems to be 4 major groups – beasts/ancients (read skeleton mobs)/angry earth (fungus people) and corrupted people (possessed people who sound like they robbed WoWs murloc sound and had Brian Blessed imitate the sound badly)

I do like a lot of the changes the game brings to others in the genre, I love the fact its classless and crafting is worthwhile in this game as its where you get all your gear from largely outside of boss or elite drops. The game is very fun to play and very compelling also even though I sound a bit ranty typing this.

They delayed it for a month to add more polish, at this point, it should have been delayed by about another 3 at least I think with major beta testing undertaken to remove the frustration from the live experiences, thats my own personal hindsight of it though as where it stands at the moment, I think AGS will discover shortly that they will need to beef up the game and sort out GMs and all manner of better community engagement mechanisms though too to at least appease frustrations.

Categories
Computing Gaming Rants! World of Warcraft

Quitting World of Warcraft

Onto New World and FFXIV

I triggered my WoW subscription cancellation last night for only the second time since 2006, I have been playing since 2006 mid-vanilla (I had a 9 month break in WoD where there wasn’t anything to do than jump around your garrison before I returned for Legion after a work colleague was telling me how good it was) 

I realised im paying £120 a year for a game that I can barely stomach to play at the moment, it has little to do with the recent sex scandals that have taken place at Activision Blizzard more to do with multiple issues with the game that I cannot look past these days, its impacted my enjoyment of the game and ill list those reasons below for you to see why I can’t face the game anymore, the enjoyment has been sucked out of it for me.

  • Complexity of rotations for certain classes – I was playing with a RL friend and rerolled to join him on CoA-EU, I was struggling when levelled then to get above 3k on my shadow priest, despite it being 220 ilvl geared it had a massively complicated rotation where any deviation on rotation means that you tank your DPS, this is not fun and even feels like a fun tax in the game, especially as I was reading three different sites on how to max and spending absolutely ages on the target dummy trying to improve but still being low dps despite my gear to the point where I was getting abused for it as being “carried” through a 10. Swapping to Shaman was the same as Elemental, if your timing is off your DPS blows hard I found, it just shouldn’t be this hard to do average to decent DPS for your class, its more catered for theory crafters than normal players I feel because of this with lots of classes having overly complicated rotations.
  • Toxicity of the player base at large – this has deteriorated very badly over the years, I levelled a paladin as a tank and started gearing it for Mythics through heroics, pulling “non-standard” routes which I was unaware of as a thing was painful and off-putting, even explaining that I hadn’t tanked in about 5 years got me abused, pulling extra packs to create a bit of room around the edges of a boss and being cautious got me booted from groups a couple of times too and further abused because of that. Wipes will see people leave groups, pulling “non-route” trash will see people leave.
  • Boosting and Pay to win – This has gone out of control in the game now and is detrimental to the fun of the game, it fills chat channels with the adverts, it fills the group finder with them also which is a painful process to clear down then and search for groups, when you have a boosted player into your group its detrimental at times as they do not know how to play their class either as they have just been a tourist and carried through it also feeds into the games toxicity quite a lot.
  • Formulaic nature of the grind in game – Mounts/Item Sets/Dungeons/Raids/Parasitic or “borrowed” Power Systems and rinse and repeat per expansion isn’t exactly inspiring stuff and its hard for me to get through it here now, even alt levelling is horribly not fun because of this, I’ve been logging in and not wanting or having the energy to face doing anything in the game at the moment because its just a massive grind to even get to an entry level for raiding or Mythics.
  • Content Drought and splitting it over multiple media – Shadowlands – the nature of this as an expansion feels flimsy to me and lacking in a lot of places, you don’t feel invested in any of the story line or the character development to me and that all feels quite flimsy and non-existent at times the storytelling even compared to BFA before it, especially when they are pushing the narrative down other media revenue avenues which you don’t partake of such as books, when they ignore those books in game then it leaves massive plot holes to overcome.  Suramar was the last zone I generally remember working through the entirety of on my DH in legion and thinking, wow this is actually a massively full zone of activity within a huge encompassing storyline that took a good few weeks to get through, whereas nothing in BFA/SL has any sort of similar feeling to it, the zones feel small and the factions struggle to make you care about them at all in any major way as their leaders all seem to be as dumb as a bag of rocks unwilling to change their operation in light of the obviously bad situation unfolding around them all and just yet again maintaining the status quo of a bad situation until the player intervenes.
  • Playing on dead or dying realms – I rerolled onto a RL friends realm and it was fun with a good bunch of people in the guild initially, but attrition for the game and how its content is severely lacking means that it has died off rapidly now, more players went on breaks and left the game after the opening few months of each raid instance, the guild finished off after HC clears on Nathria and went into hibernation and did the same again now much quicker after Sanctum, there isn’t the high enough amount of people or interest on the realm to clear mythic raids and the guild has repeatedly died because people take breaks to play other games or nothing at all which is a big problem for the game as I see it, if you were like me where you were a little late to the party and wanted to not pug with randoms instead of guildies a KSM achievement then basically you were seeing people raid logging or not playing at all and dropping off more and more until it stopped raiding so you become the only person active online in a guild regularly which is dead then and depressing.  Blizzard needs to merge a lot of the lower population realms now, not link them up, but actually merge them fully together and delete the realms to repurpose them later.
  •  Tanking and Healing are just not fun anymore – Mythics have drained the fun out of these largely and the points I made earlier have helped to make it less fun to carry out these tasks because of the stresses involved in doing these roles, if your a tank and you wipe you will get abused and blamed, same if your a healer and you wipe, it really detracts from the roles at the moment with everyone being squishy too. The fact that our guild tanks find mythic raiding less stressful than mythic dungeons is not a good sign at all either in my opinion.
  • Stinginess of loot and the loot system – I repeatedly ran dungeons at Mythic level and for 45 minutes of work, the game rewarded me with no gear at all and even a paltry low amount of anima power, not an item of any kind, just a minute bit of currency (it was even a dead currency when Korthia landed but still being rewarded everywhere), they have dropped loot levels very low now in the game (it seems about 1 item per dungeon if your lucky) and the “specialisation” system means you have to pick a spec type to get a chance of corresponding items for that spec, there’s no “any specialisation” option and there needs to be one, if I’m playing a druid with 4 possible specs, I’m happy to take any loot, but it still needs me to select a possible spec on each boss to try and channel the loot down to it, its another fix to a problem that no one really had that’s made life a bit harder in the game, its default shouldn’t be set like this.
  • Parasitic Power Systems/Lack of QoL/Alt-Friendliness and attitudes to the players from the Dev Team – This is a factor in removing the enjoyment from the game for me, the covenant system means you cant play all three specs on a character without changing between the optimal ones for that spec, its been pointed out in the beta through to live and ignored until the backpedal position taken by blizzard in the light of the recent legal troubles at the company and its absolutely wrong and should never have happened. The dev teams stubbornness and refusal to implement a lot of persistently asked for QoL systems is becoming too frustrating in the bloated nature of the game and each new expansion bringing another power grind format isn’t exactly setting the world on fire in terms of making me enthusiastic about enjoying the game anymore.  I even rerolled to a more populated realm in a last ditch effort here to be in a more active guild, I levelled a druid and just couldn’t face a renown grind/gear grind and multiple legendary grinds on top it, the games got far too much of that now and none of its fun at all.
  • Classic Loot Rules – This broke a facet of the game I really enjoyed for no real reason with blizzard, It was a fix no one asked for to a problem no one had, it was just mean spirited bullshit from the Dev team I felt and it was the tipping point where I realised they really didn’t like or give a shit about the players anymore, I used to really enjoy farming old instances to pick up the transmogrification sets and weapons, but they brought this nonsense in and changed it to remove guaranteed piece drops off certain bosses to instead offer entirely random loot off their tables, so prince in karazhan no longer guaranteed a headpiece after clearing through it for 30-40 minutes, I couldn’t fathom why they would do this in all honesty, as a fan of the game I wasn’t going anywhere and their already low drop rates meant I had to run some instances repeatedly to get pieces anyway as its still on a time gated lockout for the old content, it was introduced I felt purely to troll the player base even further at the time and should not have been in place at all.

Closing the Account

I am really sorry for the rant nature of the post I made here, but I think my biggest beef of all now is that I can see that the game has completely lost its lustre for me because of all of the numerous bullshit things done to the players by the devs teams and blizzard and what they introduced in recent years and its actually heartbreaking to me personally, this game was really special and a class leader game of its genre for so long with a massive amount of lore and history that made it much more special than all of the competitors and helped get me through some really rough times in my life.

I am lucky in my long time playing before I quit that I have enjoyed some real achievement highs and friendships in this game going back to 2006 when I started as a complete noob in a small vanilla guild and we graduated to having finished vanilla with us having cleared ZG initially progressing properly further in TBC through to downing the LK and beyond, its sad that friends have dropped off in that time as we have gone onwards to a point that there’s just myself and that RL mate who were still playing after all this time together with a newer bunch of people who have no real idea of what the early vanilla/tbc/lk version of wow was and why its revered.

Legion did a lot of good work and recaptured that to a point but its been on a downhill slope since then with worse expansion after expansion to the point where I no longer have any fun or enjoyment from the game anymore, everything feels like a massive ball busting grind now which is off-putting to the extreme, I levelled a hunter to 50 last week but just could not face having to plough through the maw again and all of SL, then have to grind out Torghast again for legendaries and renown to get it mythic ready, it was the final straw that iced the cake containing all of the above.

The grind now is absolutely awful which is sad really as I don’t think I am going to be coming back this time to the game as I have done before, thats sad considering the longevity of playing this game I have under my belt playing since 2006.

The only way I see WoW improving now, would be get the actual fans and players involved in the direct running of the game, not the corporate suits and career company men of current times who run with theory crafting, elitism and just ignore the feedback or opposition to the choices they make and brute force upon the playerbase.

New World

I have started playing this recently after watching some twitch videos of it in the beta and it is very appealing to me in a different way to WoW, its visually stunning as an MMO and pretty open ended in terms of a pvp path or craft experience through the game and im enjoying it at the moment with another work colleague as I make my way around Aeternum, the combat is both very simple and engaging with no massive amounts of rotation involved, My character name is Hargen and my home is Tir Na Nog in EU at the moment if you would like to join.

It has the one thing that WoW doesn’t at the moment – Potential for Greatness and freshness

Same for FF14 too, im playing the free version of that so far and it also understands fun without massive grinds.