A little privacy

You’ve all seen me ramble about some of my social anxiety issues before, but Blizzard has brought it all back to the surface again. In patch 7.1 there’s a new Quick Join feature that allows your friends to see that you’ve joined a queue or a group finder group and easily join you. In theory this can be great. In practice I’m not sure this is something I ever want to use. I’m too timid to randomly join anybody who was starting a queue, I would rather pug than impose on my friends. Conversely, sometimes I want to pug, for the goodie bag or because I’m feeling antisocial. If a friend asks to join either I have to tell them no and feel bad, or let them join and then I’m not doing the pug I wanted to do. At least if you queue for a Call to Arms (goodie bag) it will not show you as available for Quick Join. Maybe I will start only queuing for things that are Call to Arms, honestly that’s not super different from how I play normally. Still, I will continue to shout this from the rooftops: Give us a damn invisible mode already Blizzard.

This also complicates getting mythic or M+ groups for people without a lot of friends on their list. Now any group that forms has a higher chance of filling up with friends-of-friends before strangers get a chance to sign up. This means if you have a huge friends list your chances of doing more mythics just increased, and if you have few friends it will be even harder to get a group. Just add regular mythics to LFD already Blizzard. This Quick Join tool is solving a much less pressing problem, and causing new ones.

I’ve been slowly working my way back up to a friends list with nearly 20 or so people on it, which is about 20 more people than my anxiety could handle before. If this new tool becomes a problem for me, I’m back to either purging my friends list or just running away from the game again. I get that this is not a problem that most people have, but I also know I’m not alone. It would be nice if Blizz ever once gave any indication that they acknowledged people like me exist and have valid concerns.


A little privacy

The Shortest Season?

Diablo 3 Season 8 is here! I did my usual routine of grouping with friends on Friday night to level. This is the first season in a long time that I just could not get leveled before I crashed for the night. I think I made it to about 54 on Friday, and you could tell the group was getting tired as conversation in voice chat dwindled. On Saturday I got up early and finished leveling, then started working my way through the season journey. I decided to go with a Demon Hunter again this season because it had been so easy the past 2 times. Unfortunately this season’s set, with its buffs to rain of vengeance, just doesn’t feel that great to me. I know it is hard to judge without the full set bonus and all the extra pieces that really make things shine, but I definitely felt like I was having a harder, or at least slower time compared with previous seasons.

It might all be moot at this point, since I finished everything I needed for the first 4 chapters of the season 8 journey by yesterday morning. I’m now the proud owner of a  nice looking portrait frame, and the most disturbing pair of “wings” the game has introduced so far. I think if I want to keep going with this season I will have to farm a different class set, because even with my 6 piece bonus I’m not in love with rain of vengeance. I doubt I will bother, at least for a while, since Karazhan releases in WoW this week and I am sure I’ll be busy with that for a long time.

This season might be the shortest one for me. I’m still glad I participated, I had fun with Diablo this weekend, but there’s not much new and exciting to keep me around when other games have shiny new content. I’ll still hold on to hope that the Diablo franchise gets some serious love this year at Blizzcon.


The Shortest Season?

The Shortest Season?

Diablo 3 Season 8 is here! I did my usual routine of grouping with friends on Friday night to level. This is the first season in a long time that I just could not get leveled before I crashed for the night. I think I made it to about 54 on Friday, and you could tell the group was getting tired as conversation in voice chat dwindled. On Saturday I got up early and finished leveling, then started working my way through the season journey. I decided to go with a Demon Hunter again this season because it had been so easy the past 2 times. Unfortunately this season’s set, with its buffs to rain of vengeance, just doesn’t feel that great to me. I know it is hard to judge without the full set bonus and all the extra pieces that really make things shine, but I definitely felt like I was having a harder, or at least slower time compared with previous seasons.

It might all be moot at this point, since I finished everything I needed for the first 4 chapters of the season 8 journey by yesterday morning. I’m now the proud owner of a  nice looking portrait frame, and the most disturbing pair of “wings” the game has introduced so far. I think if I want to keep going with this season I will have to farm a different class set, because even with my 6 piece bonus I’m not in love with rain of vengeance. I doubt I will bother, at least for a while, since Karazhan releases in WoW this week and I am sure I’ll be busy with that for a long time.

This season might be the shortest one for me. I’m still glad I participated, I had fun with Diablo this weekend, but there’s not much new and exciting to keep me around when other games have shiny new content. I’ll still hold on to hope that the Diablo franchise gets some serious love this year at Blizzcon.


The Shortest Season?

Last Second Success

Surprise! I played something in the last week that wasn’t Legion! I realized that the Diablo 3 season was ending on Friday evening so I decided to hop in quickly on Friday afternoon to sort through my stash and prepare for merging my seasonal characters back into my non-seasonal stable. Usually I end up doing this after the season ends and I have a ton of items in my mail, and let me tell you, doing it ahead of time is way easier. While I was throwing away everything that wasn’t an ancient legendary, I realized that I was one conquest away from finishing the Destroyer tier of the season journey for season 7. I was pretty close to having 3 gems at level 65, so I decided to run a few rifts and try to go for it. In the process of farming rifts for keystones, I saw the season progress pop up for getting a speed run on a TXIII rift, which is one of the requirements for the stash tab. With just about 2 hours left in the season, I got my gems leveled and completed the Destroyer tier. Since I had gotten that speed run, the only thing I needed to finish Conqueror was a second conquest. About 45 minutes worth of running the Ruins of Corvus over and over again and I finally managed to get a 50 million gold streak and unlock my extra stash tab. It was pretty close to the wire but I did it.

Last Second Success

I think the most satisfying part of the whole thing is that this is the first season I can remember where I didn’t really get carried by anyone else. The friends who usually carry me didn’t play in season 7 or just barely played in the first week or 2 until the pre-Legion hype took hold. I managed to unlock the stash tab all on my own, and even got a personal best of greater rift level 71. Now I just can’t wait to see if there is finally some good news for Diablo fans from Blizzcon this year!


Last Second Success