I decided to see what it's like to stream when I play. Starting a short Diablo 3 streaming session through own3d.tv. Check it out here!

http://www.own3d.tv/Nefariouz/live/319428

My streaming schedule is erratic at the moment. This damn class is killing my free time. :(

This came in today from Arena.net:

My name is Chris Whiteside, and I'm the lead producer of Guildwars 2. Normally, I'm head-down in the trenches, making sure we're producing the best MMO possible, but I wanted to come up for air and share some exciting news with you:

Beta Weekend Event 2 will begin on Friday, June 8th, at noon PDT (GMT-7) and will run until Sunday, June 10th, at 11:59 p.m. PDT (GMT-7).


The skinny of it is that they added some things we asked for like overflow groups, say, keybindings, etc. And on top of that, your old beta characters were not deleted. So get ready to enjoy another exciting weekend!


Guild Wars Copyright and Trademark Information
© 2011 ArenaNet, Inc. All rights reserved. NCsoft, the interlocking NC logo, ArenaNet, Arena.net, Guild Wars, Guild Wars Factions, Factions, Guild Wars Nightfall, Nightfall, Guild Wars: Eye of the North, Eye of the North, Guild Wars 2, and all associated logos and designs are trademarks or registered trademarks of NCsoft Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

By the way if you haven't been following the Diablo 3 forums, there have been a rash of security incidents.... namely people getting their accounts hacked. According to the forums in some instances the victim was playing, got logged of the game and came back within a minute to see all of their gear and gold gone. Blizzard claims that all accounts that have been hacked didn't have this security measure prior to being compromised. So if you haven't yet, do yourself a favor put an authenticator on your account. Your phat lewt and your gold stash will thank you.

Well I'm back. I've been MIA mainly do to work. 12 hours for the past week or so. Anyway onto the good stuff.

On release night like the rest of the world I waited eagerly for the Diablo III  servers to open. I watched the live streams, cracked open my Red Bull packages and was counting down the seconds. As soon as midnight struck, I typed in my password and BAM! Error 1, 2, 3, 4, 8093098238. I tried to login for a full two hours and never got past the character screen. In solemn defeat, I went to bed.

The next day I finally got to play, chose a wizard and went to town. Overall the game feels good. I didn't play Diablo II so I don't have the hangups about not being to spec my character down to the last detail and then if I screwed up having to have to re-roll.

Noobin' it up!

Both of my buddies were either working or otherwise pre-occupied so I ran solo. In fact I still run solo for the most part. All in all I enjoy the game. At the moment the auction house is down and I can't buy level appropriate gear. Actually, come to think about it, it's been down quite a bit today. For hours actually... but the auction house itself works pretty well. There have been suggestions for improvements such as a notification in-game when an item is sold, when you lose a bid, etc. Why we can't sort items by time left confounds me to no end.

I'm currently on nightmare and I just hit 51.The problem is I was planning to run the famous Force Armor build which limits any hit you receive to 35% of your total health. So if you don't wear any vitality gear you can't get hit for much, and because Diamond Skin absorbs so much you can basically tank anything as long as your crit rate is high enough. TODAY.... it got nerfed. Was it an exploit? No I don't believe it meets that definition. The skill worked as intended, I just don't think they foresaw the effects of maximizing it. Did it need to be nerfed? Probably. Fortunately I didn't invest in that gear yet. I'm still trying to work out alternative builds through the forums. With the upcoming weekend I hope to start Hell and change up everything I know again.

If you're on the fence about this game all I can say is that it's a solid hack-n-slash affair. Despite the always on "DRM", the game is similar to everything you expect about the Diablo series. I personally enjoy playing with my friends, arguing about whether or not I should sell this rare or give it to my barbarian tank and just being silly over Skype in general. Guildwars 2 will probably still be my main game and this will tide me over until and in-between sessions. But hey... maybe I'll actually be able to make some real money off this game in the months to come!

So if you haven't yet heard there will be a small stress test tomorrow for GW2 beginning at 11AM PDT and continuing until 6PM. Same rules as the previous beta test. Unfortunately work comes first but I will have a few hours in the afternoon. My adventures in Diablo 3 and Mass Effect E3 are coming up next!

So I've decided to make this a gaming blog of sorts. I'll post about whatever it is I'm playing. Hope you enjoy.

First up let me give you a bit of a background. I primarily play First Person Shooters. My first serious game was Unreal Tournament. I still remember the intro music. Played that to death on my awesome store bought dell computer with a rockin' 56k modem. Epic. I've played everything from Socom, to Battlefield 2/3, Warhawk, Bad Company 1/2, Counter-Strike: Source, DoD, TF2, L4D/2, Mafia, Payday: The Heist, Portal. The list is massive. What I like most about these is the fact that you can sit down, pick up a game and stop playing whenever you want to.

I do also dabble in MMO's on occasion. The problem when I played WoW after a few years was the fact that I had to spend hours raiding to get gear, new expansion, more hours raiding, etc. After a while that got old. I haven't played in about 3 years.

So to scratch my itch I grabbed Swtor hoping it would be a great place to spend time with my friends. At first it was pretty good. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. We raided somewhat often but not enough that I felt like it was a second job, that was nice. I also PvP'd ALOT. It wasn't bad being a healing Bounty Hunter. I felt like I was contributing to the team. Then came 1.2. That pretty much did it in for me. It felt like too little too late.

As of late I was on the fence about Guild Wars 2. I had heard the hype surrounding it but for some reason it didn't really interest me. My first foray into the original Guild Wars went pretty badly. I started a character, got in game, walked outside the gate and got immediately hammered by some weird ass worms in the ground. I tried to do my quests but everything was so different. I felt it lacked any direction at all. I gave up after a few days. A few months later I tried to come back, lost my password and tried to retrieve it and ran into a mess of problems effectively killing my desire to ever touch the series again...

I didn't want to be tricked again into pre-ordering another failed game. I'd been burned too many times. After reading and doing research, crawling GW2 fan-site forums, and watching youtube videos I bit the bullet. I decided to pre-order to get into the first BWE weekend.

GOOD GOD people. World vs. World (really 3 servers vs each other) was fantastic. I could pvp, level and get gear? And I can do this all at the same time... from level 2? What nonsense is this? I literally spend $30 bucks on energy drinks and 5 hour energy shots and played till I couldn't keep my eyes open. It seems they've done everything right in world PvP. For those competitive PvPers out there structured PVP is comprised of 5v5 in a smaller map. Currently it's a conquest mode where you fight over flags, each flag giving points over time. This mode really shines and it shows.

Unfortunately I didn't PvE much. I didn't want to spoil my main story. The great part about PvE however are dynamic events. They can start from a mob running up to you, or from discovering hearts on the map. The group mechanic affects everyone in the area. People helping you out with a mob actually benefits both parts, and loot is split. Reviving players/npcs gives exp. These dynamic events range from small to map changing events depending on whether players are successful or not. Some events span a whole zone. The encourages players to get together, without having to form groups. There we plenty of occasions where I was alone and all of the sudden a group of players roll in and help assist with whatever it was I was doing. It was a welcome change from trying to tag a mob first to ensure I get the kill.

There's so much more to cover. I didn't touch crafting at all. From what I've read bags can be made for specific purposes if you choose. I would comment more but I'm woefully uneducated about the system.

There were things I wish were a bit clearer. To begin with the introduction tutorial could use more work. I also had a hard time discovering how to begin WvW pvp once I got through the tutorial. The maps don't have icons on the world map. Everything seems to have to be discovered and after that you have to remember where things are for the most part. Local chat speaks to everyone in the zone regardless of teams, and no one really paid attention to team chat. It was a bit buggy during the beta weekend. There was no say chat either which I thought was odd. Sometimes I'd want to thank a guy for helping me out. I didn't want to shout "Hey thanks!" to everyone in the whole zone. Another thing I noticed was the lack of an inspect of any characters. I would have loved to see some of the sweet gear that I saw and possibly work towards it myself.

 In essence I'm excited for this game beyond belief. Small issues aside it was a solid beta and I couldn't get enough. From the brief time I had this weekend I have to say this will be a game that I will be playing for years to come.