Grace – Page 110 – AggroChat

Hide and Seek

September 9, 2015 by Grace

After the mad rush of Blaugust, I’ve been taking a lot of time to decompress and refresh my mental batteries. One of the great things I’ve experienced by engaging with Twitter is that I know I’m not alone in my introverted ways. Sometimes it is reassuring to know your stresses and anxieties are shared and feel like you’re part of something, and that there are people who will totally understand when you need to hide away for a little while.

My default hiding game lately has been Diablo 3, but all the time I’ve been spending there has presented a problem: my enthusiasm has attracted friends to join me. When I’m feeling well, this is great! I’ve had a ton of fun wandering around smiting demons with 1 – 3 friends at a time. The down side is when I need to be alone, those folks are still in my BNet friends list, asking me to join them. I’ve found that having one or two friends or family members is usually fine, especially when they’re folks who understand when I need to hide. More than that and I start to get anxious whenever I’m not up for company. This has stressed me out in the past, so much so that I occasionally purge everyone from my friends list and start from scratch once in a while. I love that Steam has an invisible mode, and I dearly wish that Blizzard would do the same.

In WildStar I have a few account friends, but for some reason it doesn’t stress me out quite as much. I think it helps that there’s no rewards for being constantly grouped up like there are in D3. The other big thing of course is that WildStar is just one game, and I barely play any alts. If people know and friend my main character, they can pretty much find me 95% of the time I’m in-game anyway. BNet friends can see you in any of Blizzard’s games, though, which means I can’t even sneak in a quick game of Hearthstone without everyone on my friends list knowing about it. Anyway, being pushed back into WildStar right now feels fine by me. I can’t wait for the doldrums to pass and the new Drop to land in a few weeks. I might as well spend the time remembering how things are and saving up a nest egg to spend on fancy new toys. Plus I still have too many alts that need to be leveled off the arkship so they don’t get deleted!

AggroChat #73 – Pax and Prime Evil

May 21, 2019September 6, 2015 by AggroChat

Tonight we are recovering a bit from recording two mega episodes, and end up crafting a relatively short one. Since the last episode three of our hosts have been to Pax Prime and as you might expect have an awful lot of things to talk about. Ashgar, Tam and Kodra share their experiences, and some of the interesting games that they got to see. Additionally there was a pretty awesome meet up of folks from the blogosphere in Seattle and there is some discussion of that. In the meantime many of us have also managed to get sucked into Diablo 3 for Season 4. So we have been spending quite a bit of time stalking the Prime Evil, and grouping together to tackle the content.

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F2P and a PSA

September 4, 2015 by Grace

If you haven’t been following closely, you might have missed that the WildStar F2P launch date has finally been announced. On September 29, the WildStar: Reloaded drop will land and tons of changes will be heading our way! I strongly encourage anyone who is interested to grab a beta key and hop into the beta to check it out. There’s lots to get excited about and I can’t wait for it all to finally go live!

So many alts so little time

There is one catch, though. Yesterday on the livestream something pretty important got casually mentioned that bears repeating. On 9/29 when the drop happens, any characters remaining on the Arkship (the initial tutorial area) will be WIPED. From what they said, it sounds like since the entire tutorial experience is being redone they need to clear everything out of the arkships. And I suspect it is also a way of cleaning up after some folks (like me!) who had way more than the “allowed” allotment of alts due to the megaserver merger. In any case, if you have any low-level alts hanging around on the Arkship, take a few minutes to move them through the tutorial and down to the planet or risk losing them for good.

Farewell to Blaugust!

August 31, 2015 by Grace

Blaugust 2015, Day 31

It’s finally here, the day we’ve all been waiting for since August 1. Blaugust is ending today, and whether you’re a Blaugust “winner,” participant, or just a regular reader who’s been following me through this month, I wanted to say thank you. Some days were difficult but being part of this huge community of bloggers and readers has made it totally worthwhile.

So how did I do? Well I managed a post for each day so I guess I “win” Blaugust! I’ve had a regular readership of a few dozen loyal folks, with a few days where I got some extra attention. The day of my double post was my best, but there’s no way I will be attempting to post that frequently in the future. Honestly the only way I managed to get through the whole month with daily posts was by making a plan ahead of time with topics, writing prompts, and regular features like Screenie Saturday.

Writing the Shiphand Buddy series in particular was rewarding but also added quite a lot of work since I needed to research and run all of those missions many times in order to write the guides. All that hard work paid off though, since they were featured on WildStar Core!

Time for the money

At the beginning of the month I tried to take stock of my cash savings in WildStar and track it for the month. Unfortunately I got pretty lax about spending money midway through the month. Based on a couple high-cost items I bought, I’m guessing I made a total of around 150-200 plat over the course of the month. Sadly my cash-on-hand is only about 10p. The market has shifted dramatically since the beginning of August with the anticipation of F2P. On the flip side CREDD has gone up a bit in price over this month. Most of my money-making avenues are still functional but are just bringing in far less profit than they used to. Hopefully when the drop lands the combination of lots of new players and changes to gear will help me start churning out the plat again.

Some other game I play when I’m not being a space zombie

I set up my “What I’m Playing” posts in part to have an easy topic for the weekends, but also to try to encourage me to play more games. I succeeded at the first part but not so much at the second, since as the month progressed I played fewer and fewer. Partially that has been due to fatigue and stress, which make me want to stick with easy, familiar games. I may actually try to keep this feature, since it has been fun for me personally to be able to look back and see the record of what I’ve been up to all month.

Blaugust was also a nice experiment in adding some commentary about games other than WildStar here on Moonshine Mansion. I suspect I will continue this. The main focus of this blog will stay WildStar for certain, but I will happily sprinkle in posts about other games once in a while. With F2P coming soon I doubt I will be lacking for WildStar content to talk about for a long time.

At the beginning of the month, I said that all I hoped to get out of Blaugust was to get in the habit of posting more frequently. Since I managed a post every day I guess that was definitely a success. I absolutely do not plan to keep up the daily schedule moving forward, but I do have a lot more respect for the folks that post that often. My new goal is 2 posts per week, which is much more reasonable for my schedule. Thank you all again for taking this silly journey with me. And a very special thank you to Bel for all his hard work organizing this event, wrangling bloggers, tallying votes, and figuring out prizes.

Here’s to a very peaceful and relaxed September!