Gaming by the Hour – week ending 5/27/2012
This week was busy in RL, so I did not get to spend too much time in game, but on the weekend, I did manage to get in some Eve and Diablo III, and I started back up in Star Trek Online.
My main effort this week was spent outside of the virtual world of gaming. My Tivo died on Monday and I spent all free time during the week trying to get that situation taken care of. It’s really annoying when something you depend on so much dies like that. Fortunately, I was able to salvage the recordings that I had (I record too much stuff), but I am still in the process of reinstalling the scheduled season passes.
This week in Eve, I managed to go on 2 fleets – one successful, the other I flew home in my pod. These were two very different types of fleets, with one, the bad guys came to us so I didn’t have much time to prepare. In this battle, while I was able to keep many of my fleetmates alive with my Scimitar, I was pointed and primaried as my FC ordered us to warp off and regroup. At least I didn’t have to take too many jumps to get home in my pod.
The other operation involved a bit of a trip and while we saw action once we got the 30 or so jumps out to the battle, we were the reinforcement fleet so most of the fight was over before we got there. My fleetmates got in on a few killmails, but since I brought Warrior II drones, which I can not use, I had to suffice with throwing down reps whenever someone needed shield repairs. This was a pretty impressive engagement, with over 900 players in system during the fight – tidi was down to 10% and when we left, I spent 5 minutes in “warp” to get to the jumpgate.
In Diablo 3, rather than moving either my witch doctor or my wizard forward, I decided to give a melee character a try and rolled a monk. BruceLee (I am sure that is an original name) soloed for a few hours in Act I, defeating the Skeleton King and beginning the Sword of the Stranger questline. So far, I’ve enjoyed all 3 of my characters – I think Blizzard did a good job on making them all enjoyable even while playing the sub-level 10 content. One thing I need to remember though, when playing melee characters, is to be careful when you get surrounded by MOBs – I learned the hard way with my first fatality in the game.
Star Trek Online went free-to-play earlier this year and I had the desire to give it another shot this week. I created a new engineer character and blazed through the tutorial and into space around Sol (just like SpaceX did this week when it rendevouzed with the Interenational Space Station). In the time I played this week, I reminded myself of how I enjoyed the space combat missions – they are quite different than those in Eve, but they are so far my favorite part of the game. Ground combat seems to be better than it was, we’ll see how things progress as I gain more skills – previously the ground combat was the primary reason I grew tired of the game.
My numbers for the week: 3 hours of D3, 2.5 of Eve, and 3.5 of STO.
Totals from the start of my blog: 10 hours D3, 4 hours Eve, 3.5 STO, 3 hours TSW beta, 3 hours Beta-that-can-not-be-named.