Guild Wars 2 Impressions - Almost a little step forward for MMO's

Several months ago I got caught up in all the hype surrounding Guild Wars 2 and I decided that I needed to place a preorder and get in on the ground floor.
I have to admit that my excitement for this non-subscription based MMO has since dwindled significantly, but I was still looking forward to jumping into the game this weekend, when the head start launch kicked off.

It's now Tuesday evening, I have probably spent around 10 hours playing GW2 in total and I can't say that I am feeling a massive pull from the game.

Don't get my wrong though, in lots of ways I think that GW2 is a very competent game and I even believe that it is showing a positive innovative way forward in certain areas.
But at the end of the day this is another 3rd person fantasy MMO where you click on skills on your skill bar, run quests for various NPC's that seem incapable of completing even the most basic of tasks without your heroic assistance and generally spend your time doing things that you have done hundreds and thousands of times before in WoW, Rift, SWTOR, Everquest and so on and so forth.

Guild Wars 2 proudly carries on the MMO tradition of completely practical armor designs for female characters...

When I first started playing GW2 the thing I immediately enjoyed was that the combat is much more fast paced than in most MMO's. If you've played Tera Online (which you probably have not, if the sales figures are to be believed) then you have an idea about the GW2 combat system.
Instead of simply standing around and mindlessly clicking your skills until such time as either you or your enemy keels over the combat in GW2 relies much more on you moving around, dodging attacks like a medieval Max Payne. It's a nice change of pace, and together with skills being dependent on cooldown timers rather than a mana/wrath/discipline/etc-meter it creates a faster flow in the games combat.

This also means that the traditional "holy trinity" of MMO's with a dedicated tank, healer and damage dealer class has been mostly gotten rid of. In GW2 every player is expected to do a little of everything and not be narrowly focused on one of these specific roles. Another great move in my opinion.

The Diablo 3 Ruby Pump'n'Dump - How I lost 10 million gold in 2 hours

Diablo 3 is a game full of economic opportunity. There are always money to be made if you know what you're doing.
There's also a crap ton of money to be lost if you don't and you try to get in on a wild wave of commodity pricing speculation.


Incidentally, it is the latter of the two options that I amused myself with yesterday evening after having read the Blizzard post about the Paragon system that we'll get in the upcoming patch...

Free Gold just waiting for me to pick up?! Throw in some magic beans and you have a deal, good sir!

Basically the Paragon system is going to be a way of alternate leveling that will increase your base stats and, more importantly, boost your gold and magic find to an eventual point where magic find and gold find on gear because completely irrelevant.

The Paragon levels will be gained through normal XP and this is the critical part.

The Old Republic Goes Free-to-Play - Will I fall to the Dark Side once again?

With the newly announced free-to-play option for Star Wars: The Old Republic I've been thinking a lot about if I want to jump back into my lightsaber rich adventures once more.
Back when SWTOR launched in December I played the game for quite a lot of hours and managed to get my lightning tossing Sith Inquisitor up to level 50 and complete his storyline.

While I did have a lot of fun during my time with SWTOR, I found it to ultimately be a disappointment for me and I ended up only paying for a couple of months of subscription before my enthusiasm for the game dried up like a Gungan in a Sarlacc pit.

Soon all of these lightsabers can be yours for 0 monies!

The big problem with SWTOR for me is that my motivation for playing it comes largely from experiencing the story, but to fit the game into the structure of a MMO Bioware padded out the trip through your character story with many many hours of uninteresting side quests and awful space combat missions.

On the other hand I found the character stories compelling enough that I wanted to play them all, but I felt like I was being conned out of my money by being forced to spend so much time doing things that I had no interest in.

3 Reasons Diablo 3 Gems show us the "Real" value of your Gold

It's been a few weeks since Blizzard gave us Diablo 3 players a chance to sell our piles of virtual dosh for some real world cash.

A lot more cash than what I have managed to earn selling Diablo 3 gold..

I've personally used this to unload 10 million gold for 25 Euro, which I was quite stoked about.
But when I tried repeating this success with another batch of 10 million gold I found that my auction did not sell, even after posting it three times in a row.

Naturally this is a direct consequence of Blizzard's institution of a minimum price on gold.
You are not allowed to sell your gold for any less than 2,5 Euro per million, which effectively prevents the normal mechanisms of supply and demand from working efficiently.

Charts make everything look more professional!

What is happening is that Blizzard has set a minimum price that is apparently higher than what the market is generally willing to pay compared to the massive amount of supply that is being offered at this price.
The result is that sellers throw their piles of gold in an increasingly bulging pile, while the buyers come in once in a while and take a few pieces from the heap.

But if 2,5 Euro per million Diablo 3 gold is not the "real" market value how can we find out what people are actually willing to pay?

This is where the gem market comes into play. Here are the reasons that gems are such a great tool for finding out what the "correct" value of gold is:

3 Risk Free Methods of Making Gold on the Diablo 3 Auction House

There are many ways to make your fortune in the dark world of Diablo 3.
Playing the auction house is a nice way to earn piles of shiny gold without stooping to such lows as actually killing monsters or looting chests.

It's also a nice way to completely piss away all your hard earned virtual yellows if you don't know what you are doing.
There are thousands of AH sharks out there that are all seeing to continue growing their wealth by snapping up every good deal they see, so it takes more than a casual interest if you want to really make the big score on the AH.

Flipping items on the Diablo 3 AH require a bit of finesse..

However, what if you don't need to make those multi-million gold wins that the big fish are all going for?
What if you are happy making 10-50.000 gold per deal and prefer not to risk the money you've already worked hard to accumulate?

Well, in that case there are several niches on the AH that will allow you to score a small profit without very much risk on your part.

For all three of these methods the thing to keep in mind is that everyone loves a free lunch.
The reason that these methods of earning money are almost risk free is because they have a very steady market price and high market demand.

Therefore there are a lot of people that compete for these same items, so don't expect to just walk through piles of easy gold ready to be picked up.
Basically you are getting low risk for your investment but will also have to contend with a market that's also full of other bargain hunters.

Diablo 3 Auction House Money Making - Back Into the Grind

When Diablo 3 released I was ready to try to recreate my usual gold earning routine that I most recently used with some success on the auction house market in Star Wars: The Old Republic, which you can read about in my articles about making money in SWTOR.

All for me! All for me!

Now was the time to get into the gritty world of Diablo 3 and make some gold in the auction house, diving into the buffet of great money making deals with all the enthusiasm of a starving Frenchman at an all you can eat frog legs buffet.

Of course the real cherry on top of the pile of steaming hot frog legs (that's a thing, right?), is that Diablo 3 gives you a chance to turn all that sweet sweet virtual gold into some real life digital coin, through the use of the real money auction house (RMAH).
So not only do you get the chance to cackle like a madman as you rake in those fictional pieces of yellow coinage, you also get to earn a little cash from playing a game!

Well, if that is not the best offer since low priced buffets then I don't know what is.

But of course the big question is, now that I've had a chance to take part in this feast of buying low and selling high that is the Diablo 3 experience, have I actually been any good at it?

Well, both yes and no I would say.

Mass Effect 3 Review - An adequate farewell

If you read my initial impressions about Mass Effect 3, then you already know that I was not completely overjoyed with my first few hours of playing the game.
Despite my great affection for the Mass Effect games, or perhaps exactly because of that, I could not help but feel a little let down by the first impression I got from this final chapter in the trilogy.

Problems with awkward animations, flat voice work, bad lip syncing and a universe that felt a lot smaller than in the previous two games made me really concerned that BioWare had managed to do a "Dragon Age 2" on Mass Effect 3.
For those of you that are unfamiliar with Dragon Age 2, you can replace "do a Dragon Age 2" with "completely fuck up a great franchise".

Presentation has always been a fairly big part of Mass Effect.
The Mass Effect games have played heavily on providing the player with a very cinematic experience, so when I was met with bad animations and dull voice performance that was a major issue for me.
Luckily the quality of the voice overs, the lip syncing and, to some extent, the look of the animations all improve a lot once you get deeper into the game.

"Sweet, I can see my house from here !...Oh crap!"

The plot of Mass Effect 3 sees the invasion of the advanced sentient being nom-nom-nom'ing Reapers, who have arrived to rid the galaxy of all advanced life, a routine that happens every 50.000 years or so and is generally what most of aforementioned advanced life would consider "a bit of a downer".
As you take control of commander Shepard it's your job to travel across the Reaper infested galaxy and recruit the various civilizations into joining into a combined force that will be strong enough to take on the Reapers.

Being a story about large scale politics and saving all advanced life in the galaxy, Mass Effect 3 focuses much less on the intimate personal stories that were such a big part of Mass Effect 2, though you'll meet plenty of familiar faces from both of the first two games.
And as is the trademark of the Mass Effect series, the familiar faces that you run into will react differently to you depending on how you handled them in the previous games. Provided you didn't get them killed, in which case you'll be meeting new and unfamiliar faces, which again affects the way that things are going to play out.