Last Friday Season 17 started for Diablo III and I got started straight away. This time however I am playing the hardcore mode, something I really liked in Diablo II.
For those of you who do not know about hardcore in dungeon crawler games such as Diablo, Path of Exile and Torchlight, it’s a where if your character dies, it will not be resurrected. You will permanently lose your character and the equipped items. For some this makes the game more fun, giving a sense of risk, something to lose if your character dies. Other than that the game is no harder or different, but you must be careful not to let your concentration slip or get too over confident.
While watching WCS Spring 2019 I levelled up a Demon Hunter to level 70 which is the highest level obtainable in Diablo III. At the time of writing this, I also have a very modest paragon level of 15.
This is an ideal start to my season 17 and I will be looking to increase the paragon level, get some nice items, and hopefully achieve a reasonable greater rift level before either dying or stopping for the season.
I have traditionally played wizard in Diablo III to date. I have a feeling it will be fun to get to know the Demon Hunter class better and come up with some cool and effective ways to play.
This past weekend has been great. Not only did season 17 start for Diablo III but it was the weekend for a major Starcraft 2 tournament, WCS Spring 2019.
SPOILER ALERT
While I have been playing Diablo this weekend I have had WCS Spring live streamed on my TV and I have to say, it’s been an excellent tournament with so many epic games and close matches.
It has been great to see some talented young players take part in the tournament. I have been especially impressed with Croatian Leon “goblin” Vrhovec and Frenchman Clément “Clem” Desplanches. Both of these young men got pretty far and won a lot of excellent matches. If I were looking to recruit Starcraft 2 players for my team, I would most certainly be considering inviting these two who will most certainly be a big part of the future for Starcraft 2.
To see WCS 2018 winner Joona “Serral” Sotala and Juan Carlos “SpeCial” Tena Lopez in the final is hardly surprising. It was good to see Serral get revenge against Riccardo “Reynor” Romiti in the semi final after Reynor defeated Serral in the WCS Winter 2019 final 4 games to 3.
What was surprising and a little disappointing to see was how Serral completely dominated SpeCial in the final, winning 4 games to 0 in a best of 7.
Other than the fantastic games, I have to say the production and casting of this event has been excellent. I have enjoyed every moment and am really looking forward to the next event in July. It was especially nice to watch one of my favourite casters and Starcraft streamer Kevin “RotterdaM” van der Kooi cast this event along with Benjamin “DeMusliM” Baker and Leigh “Maynarde” Mandalov, all of which have been a source of inspiration for me recently.
If there are any regular readers of my blog, it will be obvious that I have not been playing any World of Warcraft lately. My last WoW post was back in January, just before the last major content patch which introduced the Battle of Dazar’alor raid. Shortly after my last WoW post, I wrote on my guilds forum that I will be taking a break and that I have every intention of coming back to the game eventually.
I have had a lot of time on my hands recently and decided to try out the game again to see if it was time to return and further my progress. I decided to focus on a number of lose ends I have in the game, I still want to reach level 120 with my mage and want to level up my relatively new warlock, Khorium, who I introduced back in December.
Part of the idea of levelling up Khorium was to complete a number of quest achievements. I think I made good progress by completing Cape of Stranglethorn, Western Plaguelands, Eastern Plaguelands (and associated full caravan) achievements which in turn gave me the Loremaster of Eastern Kingdoms achievement. While completing these achievements Khorium had exceeded level 60 so I made my way to Outland and completed ‘On the Blades Edge’ achievement. This achievement took what seemed like forever and I really struggled to stay motivated.
In addition to playing Khorium, I also levelled my mage from 112 to 115. I did this by completing invasion world quests and the odd dungeon.
While I did have some fun (Blades Edge Mountains aside), I think now is not the time for me to make my return to World of Warcraft. There are many gaming personalities out there who will tell you all about the problems with the game right now and, for the most part, I agree with them. World of Warcraft is just not fun anymore, it has great potential though and I hope Blizzard can turn things around again like they did with Warlords of Draenor into Legion.
I love World of Warcraft, I always will. There is so much history and so many memories in each and every corner that I will never completely abandon the game. I just hope that either I get the bug to play again regardless of the current state of the game or, better still, Blizzard starts to listen to the right people and make some drastic changes to their game.
The developer of Snooker Nation, Cherry Pop Games, have not yet released another patch for their game. This left Jason and I playing the old 2016 version of Snooker Nation because we feel the online multiplayer aspect of the game is unplayable since the last ‘wash up’ patch. You can read about this in my previous Snooker Nation post.
We played a best of 7 which Jason won 4 frames to 2. Jason played really well, at one stage he was going to be ahead 3 frames to 0 but missed the last pink by a very small margin, thankfully allowing me to get back in to the match. He also scored a century of 104 in the final frame but again missed the final pink denying him an additional 13 points, not that it mattered. Other than missing those pinks I do not remember any significant mistakes other than being unlucky and accidentally potting the white. This has given Jason a 3 week win streak, something I will be looking to break next week.
I really hope Snooker Nation gets patched soon, we were both saying during our conversation that it’s a bit annoying knowing that new content is available but we can’t sensibly use it. What’s worse is that we can’t roll back just 1 patch when it was working quite well earlier in the month, before the ‘wash-up’ patch.
Over the course of the last few days, not only have I for the third time tackled my anxiety by playing some Starcraft ladder games, but I have played 27 ladder games as the Terran race!
I watched professional streamer and Starcraft 2 caster Benjamin “DeMusliM” Baker use a very simple but effective opening to get ahead in one of his games. I tried to copy it and found more often than not that it would result in me winning the game, just by using his opening strategy. I further adapted it by making it an all-in strategy which guarantees short games, to help with my anxiety. If it works, I win quickly, if it doesn’t I surrender the game unless I did enough damage to justify trying to carry on. Using this strategy I earned 341 ladder points and, for the moment, I am top 8 of a platinum 3 division.
I will almost certainly lose this top 8 position unless I continue playing, and that’s fine. It’s just good to know that I can win games and be somewhat successful in this beautiful game. When I take a look at my match history, I can see that my strategy has improved over time, as has my win rate.
Any regular readers of this blog must be tired of reading about the few Starcraft games I have played and about my ladder anxiety. It’s just hard to keep quiet about something I am so enormously proud about. I don’t think I will play any more Starcraft games, at least for a while. The next time I do play I will need to decide to stick with it and play it hard, writing about every 75-100 games or if I get a significant promotion.
As mentioned in my previous Starcraft post. If there are any readers who are interested in getting in to Starcraft, feel free to get in touch. My offer remains open, even if I am not playing it right now.
This weeks game of Snooker Nation was disappointing to say the least. I was looking forward to playing the new mechanics and physics as mentioned in my previous Snooker Nation post but it didn’t turn out as well as I expected.
The developer for the game, Cherry Pop Games, released a wash up patch of sorts which in the patch notes include:
This patch has in my view rendered the online multiplayer aspect of the game unplayable. The first thing I want to mention is that the old bug of Snooker Nation being written over the table cloth for the player not hosting the match is back, this time with a vengeance and is even worse than before.
This I could live, what makes the game unplayable however is there is a 3-5 second delay between shots and everything seems to move in slow motion. I thought at first there might be some crazy setting to have things move slowly but there does not appear to be anything like that. Jason and I, through perseverance, managed to play just 1 frame.
Thankfully we were able to roll back to the 2016 version of Snooker Nation and decided to play a best 5 because of time lost. At one point I was down 2 frames to 0 with Jason at the table. Somehow however, I managed to turn things around and win 3 frames to 2. It was a disappointing victory though as I really wanted to invest my time in the new version of the game. To add insult to injury, neither of us secured a century break either.
In the patch notes, Cherry Pop Games have promised another patch which I am sure will address these issues. I hope it is delivered soon, until the game-play is fixed, Jason and I will have to stick to the 2016 version or, if push comes to shove, find a different game to play.
Today I fought my anxiety and played another 6 Starcraft 2 ladder games as Protoss, and I feel really good.
A little over a week ago, I wrote about playing 5 Starcraft 2 ladder games and that Starcraft caster Maynarde and current world champion Serral inspired me to play. That was when I was playing as random and that each game I would, at random, be given any of the three playable races. Today I decided to play my 5 placement matches playing the Protoss race.
The results were very similar, I lost 3 and won 2 of my placement matches which placed me in a gold league 1 division, then, just like before, I decided to play 1 more game which I won and immediately got promoted to a platinum 3 division.
All of the games were nice for the most part. This one person thought they would complain when I beat them in my 4th game, which was annoying. You can see from my screenshot below that either that person doesn’t like Starcraft 2 because I won or he/she didn’t like our particular match because of the way I won. I played a cautious game, but what really won it for me in the end was their lack of unit upgrades, my opponent had 1-1-1 (1 attack, 1 armour, 1 shield) upgrades where as I had 3-3-1, giving me a huge advantage.
I really should stop playing league placement matches. A professional player would suggest that I pick a race and stick to it, at least for a while, and keep playing the ladder. If only it was that simple, if only I could put this anxiety aside and play the ladder all day and write about the 20-30 games I played rather than just 5-6.
I am proud of what I have achieved but, for most people, these achievements are laughable and require no effort at all. I am happy for them, I wouldn’t wish these highly illogical anxiety feelings on anyone. For now, I will take what I can get and will keep trying, even if it means playing placement matches.
If any reader would like to play Starcraft with me, do get in touch. It would be nice to not face these ladder anxiety demons alone.
Over the past couple of days I have been trying out Path of Exile, a free to play RPG (role-playing game) developed by New Zealand based company Grinding Gear Games.
Path of Exile was released in 2013, I remember briefly trying the game out a number of years ago after Kripparrian, a successful streamer and Youtube personality started playing it. To this day Kripparrian speaks very highly of the game and still plays it on occasion.
Like Diablo, Path of Exile is a dungeon crawling game, where you pick and play a character in order to complete quests, explore dungeons and obtain loot. What makes Path of Exile arguably better than other dungeon crawler games is that your character and the items it uses are highly customisable. There is a huge skill tree in which you add points as you level your character, making it more powerful each time. This system reminds me of the sphere grid in Final Fantasy X, it even looks the same.
As well as this there are gems which you socket in your weapons and armour. These provide spells and abilities and will level up becoming more and more potent with each level. This reminds me of the Final Fantasy VII materia system. Like with materia in Final Fantasy VII, you can even link the gems together, providing additional benefits. Assuming the armour or weapon has slots which are linked.
The world is broken up in to acts with way-points to fast travel to different zones. This is very similar to Diablo II and III, as is having scrolls to identify items and open portals to take you to town where there are vendors and a place to keep a stash of items you’re not currently using.
Path of Exile is probably the best free to play game out there, assuming you have a taste for dungeon crawler RPG’s. I even think it is better than EVE Online when it comes to being free to play, which is hard for me to say. There is a micro transaction system in Path of Exile, but as far as I can tell, it’s only for cosmetic items and is not used as a ‘pay to win’ or even a ‘pay to get an advantage’ game, unlike many others which are free to play.
I really do not know if I will be putting aside the time to play Path of Exile fully, but I do intend to give it at least another day or two of my time, just to see where it takes me. The only problem I am faced with now is what to play it on? Path of Exile is available for the PC, Playstation 4 and Xbox One but is not cross platform compatible, which is a great shame.
After not speaking to my friend Jason last week, it was good to play a game of Snooker Nation with him, or rather, Snooker Nation Championship 19.
It seems that after nearly 3 years, the developer for Snooker Nation, Cherry Pop Games, decided to release a content patch for Snooker Nation and have changed the name to Snooker Nation Championship 19. This, without a doubt, is a planned response to the release of Snooker 19, a game which Jason tried shortly after the games release a few weeks ago.
I have mixed feelings about the patch improvements, but for the most part I am fairly pleased. The main change is in the mechanics and physics of the game, which now uses the latest unreal engine. There is a black disc which indicates where the cue ball will end up, assuming it does not come into contact with any ball other than the target, which we have called ‘the black hole’. It’s harder to judge the power you are hitting a target ball, which we both like, it’s good to be given a new challenge and mix things up a bit. We can also strike the ball much harder than we used to and can even make balls bounce or go off the table. I am not sure if the new physics is necessarily better or worse but they are certainly different, which is welcome.
In a best of 7, Jason won 4 frames to 3, breaking my win streak. We both played what would ordinarily be terrible shots, but considering the changes, I think we did pretty good. Jason adapted quicker than I did which in part earned him his victory. Unfortunately however, neither of us managed to score a century break.
I finally did it, I have managed to briefly overcome my Starcraft 2 ladder anxiety and played 5 1v1 ladder (ranked) games. I am both overjoyed and relieved.
Back in November I wrote about how inspired I was when Serral (Joona Sotala) won the Starcraft 2 WCS (World Championship Series) for 2018. Shortly afterwards I decided to play 5 placement matches which would determine which league and division I would belong to in Starcraft 2. I played my first match and won with ease, yet, for whatever reason, the anxiety got the better of me and I just could not hit that play button. Later, I wrote about my Starcraft journey to date and ended with where I was with my anxiety issues.
Today I saw that Starcraft 2 caster Leigh “Maynarde” Mandalov produced a youtube video showing how to get into Starcraft 2 and once again I was inspired to hit that play button and complete my placement matches. Because I had already played 1 game in November, I had 4 more to play of which I won 2 and lost 2. This, combined with my win back in November, placed me in tier 1 of gold league.
At this point I was just happy to have played enough games to be placed in a league and that I didn’t lose every game. Because I was so close to league promotion, I thought I would play 1 more game to see if I could win and maybe get promoted into Platinum league, which I did!
To say that I am proud of myself would be an understatement. I have decided to stop while I am ahead having won 3 out of 5 games today. I don’t know if I will be playing any more games, I know I should, but until a time comes where I can play without this strong sense of ladder anxiety, I will probably just stick to a few games when I feel the time is right.
Thank you Maynarde and Serral for inspiring me to once again try my hand at playing this amazing game.