3228

Innsbruck is very cool. My only complaint is I wish I had more than an afternoon to spend there. All I had was half a day while driving from Venice to Munich.

And I love mountains too. Mountains rule.

3229

I played Ark Survival Evolved on the QT3 servers. I died countless times. Thankfully some players helped me. I now have a big dino to protect me, which almost died twice.

I have a base that is near a cliff. So I am building my base, and my pet dino falls off the cliff. While this is bad, what is worse, is what was waiting at the bottom of the cliff, a T-rex. My pet just barely pulled it off (I was shooting the t-rex with tranq arrows, but I do not know if it did any good). Then when my pet was at half health still, another of its kind walks up to me. I have no idea if they were friendly or not, being herbivores, I assumed they were. I was wrong. I died, but my pet managed to kill the critter and just had a thread of health.

Then I died about 4 more times (and still will probably die more times to this) when trying to make a bridge up to a plateau that has metal deposits. There is some crack in the bridge I get stuck in, and then I float off the bridge and fall to my death.

Anyway, my weekend was mostly about dying a lot.

3230

I played some Slay the Spire and went back to old iPad apps for some reason.
There were some International Career Snooker (it was named something else before, but I forgot what), at which I am really terrible. I mostly won frames by exploiting the AI in creating silly snooking positions.
I spent some time with Xenoshyft. The game has still issues but it is much more playable that it was previously. I am not sure about the game itself though.
When you get faced with hands such as this

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early, you got basically nothing to do but start over. It is strange for a game devoid of dice to feel so RNG driven?
Finally I spent some time with Sentinels of the Multiverse. Probably spent more time reading and examining the details of the cards than I spent during the two games I played. I love figuring out the lore of this game: it’s like a Dark Souls inventory for the player to exploit at his fingertips. And mechanically, the crazy interactions make think of the joy of discovering new strategies each time in Slay the Spire. Full-circle!

3231

As expected, I spent a lot of my surfeit of gaming time running around like a chicken with my head cut off.

I bopped back into Witcher 3 for a bit. I was almost too overwhelmed by the interface/inventory stuff I’d forgotten (Um, do I want the Kwan sign or the Vebo sign? I can never remember… and what’s the key to meditate? And how do I make potions, or are they automatic? And what the hell am I supposed to do in combat besides mash the button a lot?). But since it mostly turned out to be cutscenes I went with it. Christ, this game is so huge. I just randomly interacted with a door in Novigrad and ended up watching 20 minutes’ worth of fully-voiced dialogue in a bathhouse and getting another quest or two. CD Projekt Red must have their content pipeline locked in pretty good.

I spent a few hours on Lords of Xulima, which kind of pissed me off, because just as I was starting to get into it, it threw up a bunch of impassable walls my way. Like, every direction you want to go in, there’s an unkillable monster standing there. And you can’t grind your way to competitiveness because the zones don’t respawn after being cleared. That was pretty annoying.

3232

As much as I love Inquisitor - Martyr you guys, I lost several hours to Steep this weekend. It’s so good you guys.

3233

What I really played: the first two. So good.

3234

I thought I was going to get back to Baldur’s Gate but instead got sidetracked into Crimsonland.

There’s something about the simplicity of the 10tons games I like.

3235

Dark Souls 2 for me. After wrapping up Battletech, I was in the mood to take a break from strategy and get my hands dirty, and this has been fitting the bill nicely.

3236

I already have it on “Don’t hurt me”… I just wanted to play through it before starting The New Colossus. Urgh. I hate hard boss fights =(

3237

I found this guide:

Final New Order boss fight

Final Boss: Defeat Deathshead

Take cover behind the protective glass, turning your back to it. Use your Laserkraftwerk to cut a hole in the fence, then go through and turn either left or right. Follow the path all the way along and up some stairs until you reach a turret. Hop in the turret, then look to the sky where you will see a blimp that is used to power Deathshead’s shield. Shoot the blimp down and then disembark from the turret.

Sprint to the opposite side of the courtyard and climb up a second set of stairs, hopping in the second turret and taking down another blimp. From here on out, feel free to use Hand Grenades and the always trusty Laserkraftwerk to finish off the first part of the fight. You didn’t think it was that easy, did you?

Drop down through the gaping hole in the floor to face off with Mecha Deathshead. There are no tricks to this one, just keep away from his firepower, avoid the flames and deal damage when you can. You’ll find wall chargers for your Laserkraftwerk around the area, so try to keep it charged at all times.

As Deathshead shoots, more flames will erupt and the area will fill with smoke. Rather than aim down sight, fire from the hip. This turns your crosshairs red when you are on target, and makes finding Deathshead in the smoke much easier.

Shoot him with your Laserkraftwerk, throw Hand Grenades and keep moving. After awhile he will fall to the ground, ending the final boss fight. Move in on Deathshead to finish the job and beat the game.

Maybe that will help? It’s been too long, so I don’t actually remember the fight myself, even after reading that description.

3238

I think I hid under a staircase and plinked the final boss to death. I ain’t too proud to cheese a bad guy.

3239

In case anyone here was having any inkling of doing the same thing, do not. Do not give these people your money. Do not even visit their website. Click nothing. They used to be a very small development team, they still are, but they’re volunteers now, and they’re insane. I’d go into detail but I don’t think anyone cares. I regret what I’ve done.

3240

I care! Sounds like an interesting story.

3241

Man, if we all limited ourselves to only posting things people cared about, I’d only have about two posts.

3242

I will be playing Xenoblade 2 on the Switch. And by “playing,” I mean watching an anime with interactive grindy elements.

3243

Maybe tomorrow, too tired.

3244

I would be interested in this tale!

3245

Also interested.

I’ve had my eye on Foxhole for a while now. I wonder if it scratches the same itch.

3246

Okay, I’ll tell the tale.

So I’m like, hey I found my joystick. I only ever used it for WW2 Online. Why not check it out. It’s June so they usually have a discount on their subscriptions (they do). I did the $20 for 2 months, which honestly is not terrible.

I usually play the German side, so I jumped in there and it’s pretty much the same game it’s been for over a decade but there are fancy things like fortified mobile spawns (which honestly are awful). You drive a truck out to a spot and deploy a spawnpoint, and it can only be destroyed by 4 sapper satchels (tanks can be destroyed by one satchel). And there aren’t many sappers available at all anymore, really. Also, they’re called engineers, I guess. Whatever, I thought it was silly that I couldn’t kill one of them with a Tiger or a 250kg bomb. That’s a minor annoyance.

Almost as soon as I got into the game I was jumped on by the Axis high command guys that recognized me and begged me to sign up for that nonsense again, because they need help. Okay, sure, only for emergencies, though. @ShivaX will tell you how dumb it is of me to join a HC in that game. The playerbase treats you like dirt on their boot and you are no longer allowed to have any fun. But, I skipped out on that tradition of sitting at the map playing brigade-movement chess and jumped into the fighting even when I probably shouldn’t have been.

Strangely, I seem to have gotten a little better since the last time I played (according to my sub history that would have been 2013). I can hit guys with a rifle! I could never hit guys with a rifle.

I ran up to a depot (depots are the buildings you capture in a town, then you capture their army base and then you own the town, see). It was full of little Allied soldier faces in the windows. This is worrying when all you have is a rifle. So I popped 4 grenades into two different windows and got shot dead. I was concerned, then I was told ‘Oh, high explosives aren’t working right now.’

Uh.

Uhhh.

Remember when I mentioned the mobile spawns and the satchels? Those are high explosives. Bombs are high explosives. Okayyyy moving on then.

When I first came on, the Allies were up to the German factories on the map. It looked like this:

IMG_2389

This is bad. The Allies controlled one factory town of ours, were attacking another, and had a straight shot to the third. I believe it takes 2 or 3 to end a campaign. Maybe 3. Either way it was bad.

But on Friday, I noticed that the Allies had literally all of their infantry and armor brigades deep in the south east, pushing our factories. We had 2 northern divisions. I asked ‘Why don’t we move west with those and then south? We could cut the entire thing off and basically restart the map.’ So they let me do it. I spent several hours upon hours with a handful of guys and we turned the map from that into this:

IMG_2398

All of the Allied towns remaining in that pocket in the southeast are cut off. They have no units, those surrendered to us and were send to training in England for 12 hours. So we had a free 12 hours to keep moving west. For some reason we stopped, but that’s okay. By the by, those towns are slowly surrendering to Germany. Every 3 hours the towns with a link to our towns surrender, then it starts another 3 hour timer. Those will all be German by tomorrow.

Immediately after this happens, another German high command guy runs to the forums and claims all of the credit and basks in his imaginary glory. I’m like, whatever, everyone else knows how it went. But every single German officer is congratulating him. I did most of the work, except for when I had to sleep and other vital things. Okay, I can even overlook that.

The German playerbase treats you like poo. I’m too old to bother with that. They also demand impossible things, like, move this flag to this town. Well, no, because either A) I can’t, because it’s on a movement timer, or B) it would be impossibly stupid. It’s usually B. Or they want to attack this town or this town, which is honestly great! Attack it! I would love for you to attack it, but usually I’m not running the show, I just joined, someone else is running things. They say no, I relay to the person that asked (demanded) an attack order that the boss of me said no, they blame me. Whatever, I can overlook this (somewhat).

The Allies after this German breakout started complaining about our Tiger tanks, and the amount of certain infantry that we get. (By the by, the tanks are pretty unbalanced. The Tiger has it’s super awesome 88mm gun yeah, but it’s made of paper. 1936-era anti tank guns can frontally blow it up.) We have the same infantry numbers that the Allies do. In all actuality, the Allies have 1 more entire division than the Axis side does. But the developers this week agreed with them that it’s completely unfair and are going to remove a lot of the Axis supply. What? Even 5 years ago they would have laughed anything like that right off. But apparently in 2018 you just whine your way to victory.

My question on the forums was…‘If your stuff is so inferior, and you don’t have enough of it, how did you capture one of our factories and be attacking another less than 5 days ago?’ My post was immediately deleted as ‘harassment’. Uh, okay. Now I’m pissed off.

Let’s move on to their plans for the next patch. 1.36. Oh, they’re finally going to give us what we’ve wanted since 2003 (@ShivaX you should listen to this part for sure). They plan on letting player squads pick attack objectives. The more people you have near a town, the more likely it is to get an attack order. The attack order has nothing to do with the high command. In fact, they’re getting rid of the infantry/air/naval and armor divisions altogether. Effectively the high command officers will be able to do literally nothing except fight. I’m fine with this personally, but I know a lot of people that pay to be in the HC’s, and I know TONS of people that quit years ago because THEY COULDN’T DO EXACTLY THIS (R.I.P. 3pzg and the Breakfast Club). When the game started you could fight anywhere. But when population started to dwindle they gave control of everything to the high command players. Now they’re moving back to the players can fight anywhere. Which is what we enjoyed the most way back in 2002-3.

So between all their deleting my forum posts, the toxicity of everyone (seriously it used to be a pretty chill bunch of people), the idiots that are now in charge, the screaming like babies to get what you want put into the game, it’s just a massive waste of time.

Oh but wait, this is the icing on the fucking cake.

The monthly sub fee is $17.99. What. You can play any MMO for $15 a month or less, I’ve never seen an $18 monthly fee. Oh but if that’s not your cup of tea, you can pay $15 a month if you sign up for a 12 month plan. Not so bad right? It charges you $15 a month, not up front. Oh what’s this? If you unsubscribe in those 12 months…you get to pay A $50 EARLY TERMINATION FEE. THIS IS A GAME, NOT A CELLULAR PHONE PLAN. Holy shit!

All in all, I’m out $20.

TL;DR Paid $20 to play WW2 Online for 5 days, helped my side basically win from a losing position, got verbally abused for it, no credit for it, and discovered the horrors that are hidden within the community and the development team after I gave them money. Don’t ever play that shit show. Forget it exists.

Edit: Spelling is hard.

Edit 2: I will accept questions but don’t expect answers until tomorrow.

3247

That sounds like the game I left.

New details on the stupidity, but still stupidity.