Benie's Games Blog

The beta is done and gone. I should consider soloing dungeons again, yet I keep getting that nagging “Why? Why even do it? You don’t need the gold, as there’s no new content to spend it on”
Those tokens alone to maybe keep my subscriptions going without having to pay for them, should be a reason. MoP had really no reason either, yet I did it just for the fun of it, because it’s there and it’s doable.
I think I even remember the reason why I geared up in MoP; to prepare for future content.
Not everything needs a point. Life has no point to me, yet I continue to live it. Since suicide is too painful(physically and emotionally).

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Anyway, I actually did things in WoD today! Left my Garrison for the first time in many months (since I leveled to 100)!
I completed what quests I had when I hit Level 100. I did every single bonus objective(with the final one being the hardest). I did the Ring of Trials Garrison Campaign.
I’m also now going to do the Stables quests to get the free mounts, and try to not bitch about my DPS being so shitty. I’m also doing follower missions more and seeing the proof they CAN get me gear.
Pretty much anything that is doable, I will try to do it.

I’m also thinking about doing the WoD dungeons (and also trying to ignore my “why bother?” nagging), even though I have heard rumors that due to what Blizzard did with removing Valor, no one wants to do dungeons anymore (as they’re pointless). The only point is to get gear, which… you can just do that anyway via LFR. Though I’m not sure if I can do Highmaul with ilvl 600.
Gearing is one big mess anyway. There’s so many ways to gear up, yet having gear you can keep to get you all the way to Patch 6.2 is impossible. It’s like several mini-expansions aimed against raiders.

Yet, this isn’t stopping them. So I’m hoping what I’m hearing, isn’t going to stop me. I got to stop being negative and against this expansion and actually give it a chance.. with actions instead of words.

Yet once again I seem to be the only one, or have yet to realize “There’s nothing you can do but wait. They will fix it”, as there hasn’t been a Blizzard post since last night about this. Not even a “We’re aware of these problems” statement. I think they’re probably taking the day off today, as it’s Sunday.

This doesn’t prohibit me from giving my angered opinion on why I feel Blizzard failed big time with the PTR. It’s the biggest fail in what I can remember; even worse than the release of WoD.
How so? At least with the long-ass wait times back then, you knew when you’ll be able to play. Here? It won’t possibly be ’till tomorrow.. actually no, because of the “I have a dream” guy’s day. So it could possibly be Tuesday(if we’re lucky), until they fix this shit.

There seems to be a multitude of problems reported, yet what’s bad is not everyone is having these same issues;
-The Garrison is still missing from copied chars. Most people are re-trying Zorbrix’s instructions and failing (it’s obviously not the same type of issue).
-People’s copied chars are either missing or locked to them.
-Some people are saying they can’t see servers, yet I’m able to connect to them just fine.
-Crashing all over the place (namely Error# 112).
-‘Copy Account Data’ continuously having ‘Copy failed’ issues.
-World Server Down reported by a few people.
-People that actually are able to access their Garrison(by creating a new char), they’re getting an error similar to the WoD Beta when trying to access their Drafting Table.

That’s all the game-breaking bugs I’ve seen. This is all from pushing that PTR build last Friday. This is the biggest PTR fail ever (again, what I can remember). The pre and post-Cata PTR wasn’t bad. The pre and post-MoP PTR wasn’t bad.
It’s the Garrison. It’s always been the Garrison. The game starts at the Garrison, and it ends at the Garrison. It should had never existed. Imagine how far less issues would had happened (and my opinion of WoD wouldn’t be so bad).

I wonder how long we’re going to have to wait to get most (hopefully all) of these issues fixed, when they finally announce “Ohh yeah, we know about these!”… ’till Wednesday or Thursday maybe? And who’s to say there won’t be even more issues they’ll have to fix, that could be even worse?
To say this is overly ridiculous and is also the fault of poor management, is an understatement. This is truly WoD Beta #2.

The only good thing I can see from this, it doesn’t affect the Live servers.

So I’ve heard about this “veteran account” thing a few days ago(one of the new things in Patch 6.1), how it has limits, yet allows you to play up to Level 20 for free.
This means, when my two accounts expire in Mid-March… I can never really leave WoW. They’ll be in this new mode until I choose to pay again. Either by this new token system, or whatever means.

Though of this being a bad idea, it depends on how you look at it. People like me who are all “FUCK YOU I’M DONE!”, this is Blizzard’s way of laughing in your face while singing the last few verses of Hotel California… “You can check out anytime you like… but YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE!!!” D:<

The other way (and correct way) to look at it, it's a way for people to come back to WoW but can't afford to. They'll still be able to play their alts for free(up to Level 20).
*sigh* To be honest, I'm actually glad they did do this. I don't WANT to quit WoW! I really don't! Even though I don't play it right versus the average player, I still like WoW. The memories I had with it.

It's just like the MRT Server. I can never leave. That song was right, that "you can never leave". As in, your feelings will never be able to leave what you enjoyed. Your anger and frustration will, but your feelings will never be able to.

It seems over in Irvine California, they’re having a shitload of issues trying to push out a build for the PTR.
It started Friday afternoon. It’s now Saturday afternoon and still no PTR build, which makes this the longest build push in WoW history(from my knowledge anyway).

Some people are rumoring that the build won’t come out ’till Monday. I do hope that’s not the case. But if it is, and they leave the PTR servers down that long, then… what can I do about it? Nothing.

They had a power failure with some random guy hitting a pole which somehow took out half the power in the city. And this morning, crashing issues with their software.
Is this a sign of something bigger (Fate doesn’t want us to test), or just a lot of bad luck on Blizzard’s end? I’ll go with the latter.

No update from Zorbrix (in this thread about the build and through Twitter) makes me a bit worried. Do hope they still got it covered.

UPDATE: 4:45pm. They’re now deploying the build to battle.net. It’s 22GB, almost as if the PTR is re-installing itself. This is going to take a good hour to almost two hours for me to download and install, even with 5.30MB/s.

UPDATE: 6:26pm. Still downloading the build. Had some issues clientside, but they seem to have fixed themselves. I also should be eating Dinner right now instead of posting updates(got my food infront of me, but this is more important. :P)
MMO-Champion’s got a new post about the datamined changes of this build.

From what I’m seeing, there’s now new profession missions for your followers (Level 100 only) that when completed can give you a few tokens(2 to 5) you can use to insta-complete your Work Orders(based on what profession buildings you have). That is so cool, and gives followers another point to get them to Level 100.

Also, the Lumber Mill and the Trading Post now cost NO Garrison Resources. However, they cost more gold to compensate for the change.

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Overall, I see nothing really, really interesting. Still NO REASON TO GEAR UP for soloers! D:< Very depressing. I want more than "Because it's there!" How about "Late-game MoP raids can now be solo'd!" like they did in 5.2? That would not only give me a reason to gear, but a reason to solo again!

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EDIT: 7:50pm. The download is FINALLY DONE! And people are complaining their Garrison is gone yet again.
I tried to delete my already copied over char. That got done. Then put him back in as a new copy. That got done.
Then I tried to Copy Account Data. This lasted a minute until I see "Copy failed". This lasts for a good five minutes, then suddenly seems to work. So I get in, and I find once again my Garrison is missing!
I try re-copying my account data, and it seems the copy feature is now down.

If I was a true world famous critic with words that can shut video game companies down, I'd be writing a pretty bad review about Blizzard right now (after I deal with EA and all the other corrupt companies, of course).

I know they will eventually fix these bugs. Just makes you wonder if they tested these things beforehand, before even shutting the servers down. But that's why it's called the 'Public TEST Realm'.

Just in: The PC port of GTA V is now available for preorder through Steam. Set price is $59.99. Release date is still March 24th.
It has two incentives for preordering, which you’ll get on release;
#1. You’ll get $1,000,000 in ingame money, plus another $500k for GTA Online.
#2. If you preorder before February 1st, you’ll get an additional $300k, plus a free PC copy of GTA: Los Santos.

Both are nice, and with GTA Online I believe you can actually play offline and set up the fun challenges(such as the ones Dan has for his videos).

And already the “haters gonna hate” crew are in the Steam Comments, begging players not to trust Rockstar with your money, and $60 is too much for an over a year game.
It’s reminding me of myself, not to get people to preorder WoD. This time I’m on the praiser side that wants the game.

Most of these people, are actually people that have to pay even more than $60 (aka Australia). And here I thought a PS4 for $400 was expensive. I couldn’t imagine the price tag over in Aussie land.

I was strongly considering(even saying I was going to) of buying this game on release, but.. given the fact I’m thinking about getting a PS4..even though I’m not sure if the PS4 has the first person view. Maybe it’s the XBox One?
But the second reason, who’s to say this won’t be a shit PC port? “Shit” meaning bad key combinations, like Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag having the Action key also bound to Counter, and also the bad camera angles.
That to me would be considered “a shit PC port”. Yet I still like Black Flag.

I, and I’m sure a lot of others eyes will be locked on Rockstar’s moves as March 24th slowly approaches.

The PTR is WoD Beta #2, that could be better?
Unlike my previous blog posts about “This is what I hate about WoD”, I’m beginning to understand that what they’re doing in Patch 6.1 right now, is possibly the infancy stage of something better.

The whole “quests that start at the Iron Docks” mentioned in the many datamined things of 6.1, BellularGaming did a video about it. He believes this could be similar to Patch 5.1’s Stormwall. On either side of the Iron Docks, is a camp for the Horde and Alliance, respectfully.
Both camps have no NPCs. It’s just a bunch of clutter right now.

What I’ve been told how you’ll have a quest to go there from your Garrison. Well, the fact NPCs haven’t been added, obviously there’s no quest yet.
Yet I’m still curious why Bronzebeard is in my Town Hall with a daily to go to Skyreach. Blizzard seems to be hush-hush about it, and no one is telling me anything.

Overall, it seems Blizzard is trying to win back confidence, by pushing this patch as quick as possible. Yet, Level 90’s on Live who are too lazy to level up, are complaining why Blizzard has no Level 100 premades.
I’m trying to be very cautiously optimistic about this. Can’t trust Blizzard more than I could throw them out of my life.

Right now, they’re working on a new PTR build. So yeah, it’s the WoD Beta all over again. Even Zorbrix who’s letting us know about it, as back. Haven’t seen his face since the actual WoD Beta.
I would imagine it’ll take the usual 8 hours until completion.

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Blizzard’s 10 year reward, and why I’ll never get it
A few days ago, it’s been announced Blizzard is giving away free smaller size statues of Gromash Hellscream (similar to the large statue they have outside their HQ) as a reward for making an account within 60 days since the game launched.
Though it seems I didn’t get anything in the mail. And now I know why… wow. Was I so wrong. But at least now, everything makes sense.

So, remember I claimed I subscribed New Years Eve 2004? Actually… it was January 2nd, 2006. And it actually makes sense when I think about it. Though however, I still do remember getting into WoW after Christmas via the free trial. That much is true, yet not the year. Been kind of confused about the year. I assumed 2004, but it was actually 2005; the same year where I got a new custom built computer.

Also I figured out that BEAVERMON2, my second account, happened in 2007(about the time I got into GMod and met angry). That would make sense as well.

So it seems I’ve been playing off and on for 9 years. Again(and the final time), makes sense. So next year’s January will be my 10th year.

Blizzard has gotten Garrisons to now copy over with your copied char. Looks like it’s not going to be much of a strain. Maybe they got it where it sends in small packets or something.
Zorbix made a detailed post what they had to do to get your Garrison to show up with you, with included instructions on how to get your Garrison to transfer, here.
So now I can test everything, or at least see what’s been changed.

Here’s the changes I’ve seen, and they are many;
-Followers will creepily stare at you when you walk around, even while walking by or ‘talking’ to other NPCs. What the fuck?!
-Follower missions now show when they expire.
-Follower missions use your follower roster and show if you have followers that can counter enemy abilities of that mission. Of course you still have to manually assign followers to missions.
-Your Follower Roster now shows how many followers you got that can counter each type of enemy ability.
-There’s new types of missions. I see “Exploration” missions which can either give 100 Zone-specific treasure maps or up to 100 Archaeology fragments. Level 100 missions, sometimes can have a weapon/armor enchantment for your followers.
-Follower XP for missions seems to have been increased, obviously to help people to get their followers to Level 100 quickly.
-Reshad and Percy have been moved a bit away from Eileese Shadowsong. Not sure the reasoning.
-Muradin Bronzebeard is in your Town Hall, with a daily to go to Skyreach and kill a key target to protect your Garrison. This could be a Garrison Campaign mission… wish it was soloable. :/
-You can purchase five follower contracts from Deluwin Whisperfield for 5k each. Unsure if these are to give you followers you couldn’t get before due to quests.
-They’ve moved the DPS training dummy away from the Tank dummy. Though I believe this is an old fix.
-The Level 2 Storehouse, the Guild Banker NPC has been removed, and there’s now a chest.
-Your Steward in a Level 2 Barracks, now has a “Bodyguard Miniaturization Device” for 250 Garrison Resources, that can shrink your Bodyguard for one hour. I suppose this is useful for Gnomes.
-‘Complicated Wood’, the joke item from the beta has been removed.
-The three clickable practice dummies near your Barracks have been removed.
-Pepe, the little bird you can get in your Garrison now has sound. Haven’t seen its Twitter access yet.
-NPCs at the two tables, if they see you siting in a chair they want to sit in, they will eventually walk away instead of stare at you until you get up.
-They FINALLY fixed the high chair in the Town Hall!

A bug I noticed, of the mission “Exploration: Nagrand Treasures” is Level 1000. Someone added too many 0’s there.
And that’s pretty much it. I do want to add here that what Muradin says about this bad bird needs to be stopped before it destroys your Garrison, is utterly ridiculous. The Spires of Arak is too far South from my Garrison for their death beam to reach here.
Plus, didn’t you destroy that damn thing during the questline?

That’s all to say. I’ll edit this post if I find anything else that’s new.

Two major PC Gaming news stories(and one questionable news thingy) this morning. Let’s get right to them(while I listen to SpaceEngine’s awesome music in the background)…

Keen Software House announces new game
Yesterday, the makers of Miner Wars 2081 and Space Engineers have announced they’ve started production on a new game; Medieval Engineers. Mike Rosa, the CEO of the company, has announced that this will not affect the further development of Space Engineers.
They’ve hired more people and have a team of devs working on the two separate titles. The game will feature the dark ages of catapults, kingdoms, knights, and of course(though not implemented, yet I hope it will soon)… the age of the fire-breathing European Dragon. 🙂

From the developer video, the game looks amazing even as an Alpha. But that’s not surprising from an awesome dev team by Keen Software House. … If only I could say the same thing about Blizzard. Meh.
I wish them luck with this new game, and look forward to a Steam Early Access release in the near future. Maybe late 2015? Who knows.
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GTA V PC release pushed to March
It’s official. Rockstar has delayed the long-awaited PC port of GTA V, to March 24th. Already a lot of players are in an outrage over this, with some cancelling their preorders and vowing to never buy another Rockstar game.

Me personally, Rockstar can take all the time they need. As long as it’s not a shit port on release, I’ll be happy.
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..Should I go console again?
For almost all my life, I’ve been a PC Gamer. I’ve owned my share of consoles. I’ve owned an Atari 2600, Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Sega Saturn, a PSOne, and my latest(which I still own), a Nintendo Gamecube with a Gameboy Player.
But everytime I got a system, I got bored with it and either sold it or threw it in the trash. All because I liked the ability to play right on my computer. Plus, I can mod my games.

But given the fact the PC release of GTA V will be delayed to March 2015(and I really wanna play it), and how Warlords of Broken Promises is.. well, see my title, I have somewhat strongly considered to getting a PlayStation 4 to have something else to do for the rest of my pathetic life. Mainly because of the high praise I’ve heard from Dan.
But this thing isn’t like a standard game machine from the 80’s/90’s(aka the Nintendo and the Sega Saturn); ohh no. It has internet access and stuff. You can watch movies from Netflix from it. You can even turn it into a Blu-ray player. How fucking cool is that?! It’s quite amazing how technology has moved from the 80’s and 90’s.

Argo, why the price is a ridiculously high $399.99 for the system alone(about the price to upgrade my computer’s parts). And that doesn’t include tax, and/or S&H(depending where or if you buy it online). Of course, the system was released to the US and the UK, last month. To wait for a discount, would be waiting ’till Sony releases the next one or until Black Friday. Aka, near the end of the year. And I reaaaalllllllly don’t wanna wait that long.
There’s also a fee to access the PlayStation Network, but only if you play with friends(like Dan does for his GTAV videos with Martyn or his father). Since I have no (real) friends, that’s not really a concern for me.

Overall, to review non-PC games in this blog, would be quite interesting, and I won’t be all “Ohhh.. this is another depressing WoD post. Listen to me rant and be even more depressive!” Kind of another reason to get one. Plus, be able to purchase and play console-exclusive games like Little Big Planet 3, and of course Grand Theft Auto V in glorious first person view, would be also cool.

I asked in the WoW forum’s Gaming and Hardware section, and was told a lot of positive things to make me want it more(some that I edited this section of the post).
So… it could be possible I would be able to purchase the system next month, then talk about what hell I went through (or none at all) of setting it up in a new blog post.

It’s been announced on Twitter; the PTR is now updated for 6.1. However, we’re still in MoP, all characters have been wiped, and the Copy Character system is STILL down…
Tomorrow is standard maintenance. We should be in Draenor by then, and Character Copy should be working. So, there’s no point in coming on right now.

UPDATE: 9:01pm January 13th. Finally took the time to play the PTR. Character Copy is finally working since the beta, …and my Garrison is missing… literally missing. Aka not there. Vanished. Others are having the same issue. When I was saying in previous posts of “what if the Garrison didn’t exist”, this isn’t what I meant by it.

After thinking about it, I have a theory why this has happened, and you don’t have to be a game developer or a tech support guy to figure it out. Quite obvious really. They ping your Live server to get your character data, so you can transfer your char over to the PTR. Yet, they never set it up(it could possibly be one hell of a strain on their systems) to also ping your server to get your Garrison data. This would include what tier your Garrison is, what tier your buildings are, how many followers you have, the types of followers you have, what work orders are still ongoing, what follower missions are still ongoing… etc. etc.
As you can see, they would have to pull a LOT of data to get it working for you. Which is why, our Garrisons are missing.

Someone’s suggested that they should had put in the old beta Garrison Builder system in(way before I joined the WoD Beta), to re-create our Garrisons. Hopefully they’ll do this, as it would work.
So, I have no way to test out the new features for Garrisons. This is pretty much half the content ‘locked’ because of this.

But I did try out the new FP system. It isn’t as “direct” as they claim it would be. When I fly in Azeroth, I fly in a straight line. Don’t crows do the same thing as well?
I flew from my invisible Garrison to Yrel’s Watch as a test, and the Faire Dragon flight I was on, was turning and twisting for no reason, and also getting low to have to dodge trees.
Blizzard, how is this “direct”? Do you guys not fucking know what a direct flight is? Have you all never been on a plane that was a direct flight, and see it DOES NOT FUCKING TURN AND SHIT! It flies in a STRAIGHT LINE!!
*clears throat* Sorry. I had to let off some stream there. But seriously, given what I’ve seen from the beta, I shouldn’t be surprised they half-assed it like everything else they do that’s not a dungeon or raid.
Once again, Blizzard made false promises. Get that hype up, then hide behind “we care for our customers’, when you really don’t. Still, It is better than it is on Live.
FPs aren’t really something on my high priority “give a fuck” list.

I flew to Ashran to check out the rumors of that new Apexis Gear tier. What I saw, was…. was a feature no one, and I mean NO one asked for(well, as far as I know)!
There’s now five ‘Apexis [item] Trader’ Arakkoa instead of the three which represented the three tiers.
It’s now a big mess, in my opinion. It’s also not needed! It’s bad enough this proves Apexis Gear will never be a replacement for Valor gear, but now I have to click on five traders for each individual gear piece to get what I need?! This is ridiculous!

I’ve expressed my opinion on both the FP system, and the questionable ‘need’ for five gear piece vendors instead of three gear tier piece vendors. And once again, like always, I seem to be the only one bitching about it. No one else has responded to either of my posts.

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My subscriptions are still planning to expire in mid-March. If they want my money again, they best do something quite quickly. As in, soloable content that gives a point to gear up. They did it in MoP, they should do it in WoD.