Gaming – Page 364 – A Pixel Nomad

My Favorite Vanguard Memories

It wasn’t a surprise when I heard tonight that Vanguard would be closing its doors, but that doesn’t mean that I was any less surprised, and maybe even a bit hurt. Still, 7 years is nothing to sneeze at, most companies probably would have closed the door long ago. I wanted to share a few of my favorite Vanguard memories, I’ve been playing off and on since beta, and this game has been one of my favorite for MANY different reasons.

– I was a volunteer guide with the SOE program for approximately two years in Vanguard. I met amazing players through the program and was able to interact and RP with them in ways I always wished I could. This was one of my favorite things to do in game.

– Vanguard was the first game I ever played where I quite literally built my house from scratch, brick by brick. I still own the house.

– Vanguard was the first game I ever played that attempted a ‘seamless’ open world without instances. It didn’t exactly work out the way it was intended, but it was always beautiful.

– I ran a lot of events in game, including a scavenger hunt for my guild ‘Safe Haven’. I eventually joined the EQ2 branch of the guild because they were just that amazing.

As I sit here and think about everything I’ve done in game and browse through the thousands of screenshots I’ve taken I can’t help but get a bit teary eyed. I doubt any but those closest to me know just how much of myself I poured into this game and how much it has given back to me over the years, helping to keep me sane when the world around me was a disaster. I’m so very thankful and grateful that it was allowed to run for as long as it did and I will miss this game very much.

What 2013 Looked Like #raptr

I’ve been using Raptr for years now, being a huge fan of lists and graphs. I started out first using xfire but that didn’t last, and raptr does a good job at what I want it to do. Plus you can earn some neat rewards. Anyhow, they sent me an email about my 2013 gaming year. I was pretty heavily into EverQuest in 2013 (that’s the original) so it’s no surprise that it makes the top of my list followed by EverQuest 2. A few things to keep in mind – this is not 100% accurate, there are times I don’t bother loading raptr and thus it doesn’t track. There are times the game isn’t recognized and I have to track by hand – like Wurm Online. Even though it actually shows as my 3rd most played game, I had to manually track those hours. If you take into account the time I left my characters online, it was probably my 2nd most played game, maybe even my first.

It’s also easy to tell that there’s a HUGE difference between the games I focus on, and ‘everything else’. Looking at 2013 vs. 2012, I also tracked almost 700 more hours – but again a lot of that is manual tracking, I tend to track Wurm for 6 hour rounds because that’s the maximum you can track at once, and not because I was actually playing for that length of time (some times it was more, some times it was less).

37 games total made the 2013 play list, not including any games that I played on console or 3DS (there were a lot of 3DS games this year).

Predictions for this year? Eh, I don’t really have any. We’ll just have to see. So far World of Warcraft is topping the list, especially since I haven’t been tracking Wurm. There are some new releases on the way but whether or not I’ll play them – and stick around – has yet to be seen.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

RNG Plays Nice (Sometimes) #WoW

I make a lot of jokes about my lack of luck – my favorite saying is “If I didn’t have bad luck, I would have no luck at all.” Every so often that theory is blown out of the water, and yesterday was certainly a good day for that.

I have been ill so I haven’t been able to play for very long, but I did want to get a celestial kill done since it was Tuesday and things had reset. I queued up in the flex raid finder and before I could blink I was ported over to a PVP server and in group. Only one problem, being a PVP server meant that we were all flagged automatically and a lot of us came from PVE servers. The horde tagged the first celestial while we looked on so we had to wait (while being randomly attacked). Then we tagged the next celestial and since there were so many of us compared to the handful of horde that had gathered, we made quick work of the encounter (and a few of the horde, too as you can see by my achievement progress above).

That is where luck first showed up – I won a pair of ilevel 553 pants, part of my heal set. I was incredibly happy. I was already wearing pants that were my 2nd best BiS, tailor crafted, but these are my BiS (best in slot). Once the raid was over I went back to Stormwind and gemmed them and added an enchant, then I decided to head to Karazhan to try for the fiery warhorse’s reins.

It’s really easy to try for this mount because it comes from the first named in the zone. I had been running the raid zone for a while now on all of my characters in an attempt to get the mount, but with a .8% drop rate, I had never seen it – before yesterday, of course.

I continued on through the raid zone in an attempt to collect a few pets and got lucky when it came to the theater encounter, the mob up happened to be the big bad wolf, and he dropped the Lil’ Bad Wolf pet collar. All in all it was a pretty productive day. I finished things off by going broke and purchasing all of the mounts available from the Golden Lotus. I love mounts and while I may not collect them as eagerly as I do pets, I still collect them (I’m up to 70 at the moment). Money is normally what holds me back, having so many alts can get expensive. I put up a few items on the AH and called it a night.

Now to decide which mount I want to go after next! It will probably be the Deathcharger.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Raiding with Leashes #WoW

Thanks to some amazing help from Kanad (one of two guild mates), I’ve been able to get a really good start on the achievement posted above, raiding with leashes. Not that long ago pets were added to older raids, and of course that meant that there was an achievement associated with them. Four more pets are all I need to earn Mr. Bigglesworth, and I need 5 more pets to earn Tito’s Basket. This weekend Lil’ Bad Wolf finally dropped from Karazhan, a pet that’s all the more difficult to get because the encounter at the theater is not always that particular scene.

Eventually I’d love to earn the ‘crazy cat lady’ title but I need some pretty rare cats in my collection in order to do that. Mr. Bigglesworth is a part of it, so at least I’m making some progress.

I love these little achievements and things to keep me busy when I’m not doing something ‘productive’. These are the things that keep me playing a game.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Ding, Level 25 Pet Obtained! #WoW

Last night I just wanted to relax with something easy that required almost no thought. It has been a really long week and I didn’t want to deal with other players. I settled in to do some pet battles and I wasn’t disappointed. I have been leveling up lil ‘xt a mechanical pet, along with a dragonkin and a beast. This combination is not always the best when fighting against NPC tamers – but it’s a fantastic combination when out in the wild. A lot of the pets you’ll be up against are beasts and mechanical pets do very well against them.

Before I knew it, I had my first level 25 pet. The others are quickly following because once your pet stops gaining experience the experience earned is divided towards the other team members. Now my team consists of a 25, and two level 24s. Next on my ‘to do’ list is to finish beating the tamers in the world so that I can earn the safari hat and boost my experience gained by 10%. There’s a lovely addon that allows you to swap out your regular hat for the safari hat when you do battles, and this will help me actually make use of it for once, instead of having it sit in my bags doing nothing like I would normally do.

I also managed to raise my collection from 212 pets to 232. 250 is my next objective for the achievement – and I couldn’t be more pleased. Over all? It was a fantastic calm evening spent doing pretty much nothing which is what I wanted right from the start.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!