The discrepancy between Gold cost for crafting and buying items on vendors in-game, and some of the prices being practiced on the AH is just abysmal. Crafting “blue” items for my level 14 character can cost between 300 to 600 Gold plus up to 10 Subtle Essences depending on the item, and that will make usually level 10 equips with 2–3 magical properties that are just okay. At the same time if you play it smart you are able to buy level 14–15 Rare “gold” items for as low as 200 Gold (from personal experience).

Will I care much for dropped loot in-game or crafting when I can buy better stuff on the Auction House? I’m not sure. I think perhaps only for their resale value. Will this make me enjoy the game less? I don’t think so. I like the game because I get to kill demons non-stop, and because I enjoy the story, not because I get tons of loot. And I do get some satisfaction from buying awesome things as well, so I’m not worried about that.

What do you think? Does the AH make you value your loot less, and does that make the game less enjoyable to you? Let me know on the comments.

On a second note… dear Blizzard,

Pretty please, with sugar on top: let us filter and order auctions by Time Left, and use the Auction interface in-game so I don’t have to choose between tracking my purchases and dealing with getting outbid, or play the game.

Thanks,

Kemwer

On the Auction House [Diablo 3] is a post from: Kemwer Game Blog. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

Guess what happened every 3 minutes or so?

Removed from Game
You’ve been removed from the game

Lost Connection
There was an error (Error 3007)

UPDATE

So if anyone there is also facing problems with Error 3007, we found a strange “fix” to the problem on the official forums: once you’re logged in, you’ll see the chat on the bottom left, with a message for joining the General Chat. Click that link to stay on that channel.

You’ll have to get used to seeing unknown people chatting while you play (strange on a non-MMO game), but at least you stop being removed from the game.

So I tried to play Diablo 3 today… is a post from: Kemwer Game Blog. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

It’s seriously one of the best games I’ve played in years — not even Skyrim got me excited about gaming the way Diablo III has. It’s just too bad that the model we’ve had to resort to in order to prevent piracy is exactly the model that’s killing the genre of PC gaming. Oh, wait, did I say just “PC gaming”? I meant “all video games.”

Source: Cracked

5 Reasons ‘Diablo III’ Represents Gaming’s Annoying Future is a post from: Kemwer Game Blog. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

So… my main. Damn, that’s been a long journey. For the longest time I didn’t really have my identity in virtual worlds, I just picked whatever name that sounded cool enough, usually using name generators directly inside the game. Even in online games, every game meant a new identity. I just couldn’t find myself to like one character, class, or name. And then, on a warm evening in 2005, everything changed for me.

The oldest screenshot I still have of my WoW character, after the great HD crash of ’08

I created a character named Kemwer for the first time, and that became not only my main character but in a way a reflection of myself. I mean, I’m not really a large black cow, but that was the first time I associated myself with a character name. I was no longer playing with Kemwer, the Tauren Hunter, I was a Tauren Hunter named Kemwer, or just Kem among friends. That’s when I started playing with characters on video games, and started created characters to represent myself on them.

That was when Kemwer the Hunter finally died.

This is why it’s hard for me to describe my character’s personality, because he’s me. He is the same methodical and slightly OCD-ish person I am (he is an engineer after all, as you can see by his stylish shades). He’s helpful and cares about his group, using his trustworthy pet Mihos to get others out of trouble. He grew to become one of the leaders of his guild, and led a couple of expeditions to the then unreachable Mount Hyjal to celebrate New Year’s Eve, he was present during the opening of the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj. And then, after three long years, just a few months after reaching Outland during The Burning Crusade, realized he no longer wanted to live on that world. That was when Kemwer the Hunter finally died.

But his spirit lived on. Some time after disappearing from Azeroth, he was reborn in the Warhammer Universe.

Kemwer Seth and his siblings — all named after mispronunciations of my name by guildies, probably the best idea for alts I ever had since they usually get the “Kem” part right — didn’t last long, but still bring good memories. Kemwer was a Disciple of Khaine, a combat healer that taught me what was exactly I enjoyed the best about MMOs: helping other stay alive. I loved combat on that game, and the class and combat mechanics are still among my favorites on all MMOs I ever played, the rest of the game was the problem.

It was then I decided that I would always try to focus on classes that have great support potential, specially healers. I mean, look above: of the four classes I played, two were healers (Disciple of Khaine and Shaman), one was a tank (Black Guard), and only one was a pure DPS class (Sorcerer).

The same focus on healer/support classes continued on my next MMO, Allods Online. I have no screenshots saved of my time on Allods, so here’s my forum sig from those days.

Now I’m preparing myself to start on a journey to a new universe. Kemwer will live again, this time in Tyria as a Charr Elementalist. May his tale be epic, and his comrades many.

As for the bonus challenge, I started following a bunch of new bloggers on my personal Twitter account since joining the NBI, including a few ones this week, so I’ll just let you all know you can find me here: @DivinoAG. You can also find the link on the footer of my blog on my blog’s header (I forgot I changed my layout). Follow me there, and let’s keep the conversation going. ;)

#NBI Challenge: What’s My Main Again? is a post from: Kemwer Game Blog. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

I would love some feedback for this theme, both from those that saw its earlier version and from the newly arrived. Thanks.

A new look is a post from: Kemwer Game Blog. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

I know what you’re thinking, this sounds like a lame excuse because I didn’t buy Diablo 3 yet… and you’re absolutely right! I’m delaying this purchase until I can make room for it on a very important place: my wallet. But I did get a beta key for Torchlight 2 recently, so it’s the best opportunity to play a bit of this little fella and see how it stack up next to the big demon in the room. I only played it for a few hours, so this should be brief (but then again this is me, and I’m hardly ever brief).

Squirrel!!

Character creation is very simple and straightforward. You pick your class, gender, face type/skin color, hair style (only a couple of choices) and color, pet, and names for both your character and your pet. Customization is very spartan, but I do like the variety of pets. Who wouldn’t want to play the game with the constant company of a slobbering bulldog or a tiny ferret?

The classes expand on the first game, but are still very standard for fantasy games. You have your caster, melee, ranged and… different melee with fist weapons. On Torchlight these are creatively called Embermage, Engineer, Outlander and Berserker, but you could just call them… I don’t know, maybe Wizard, Barbarian, Demon Hunter and Monk, and you could probably understand what each class do in general terms. I’m not complaining, I like the classes on both games, they feel very different from each other, but are on both cases standard fantasy stereotypes.

The game’s art style is colorful and quite unique, giving Torchlight a very distinct feel from the bleak Diablo. I enjoy both in different ways, so it’s not like there’s a winner to choose. Sometimes your character can look a bit like a clown with all the colorful equipment full of weird shapes, but I think it fits perfectly with what the game is trying to accomplish. I also need to give major props for the superb soundtrack by my absolute favorite game soundtrack composer, Matt Uelmen. It’s funny that Torchlight’s music sounds more Diablo than the soundtrack on Diablo 3.

What is the weasel doing anyway?

Torchlight 2 relies also on classic quests that are very familiar to fans of the genre, so it is quick to get in and play. Combat is frantic and perhaps a little confusing and overwhelming, with tons of enemies jumping at you all the time, sometimes making it hard to understand who you are, where is your pet, and who should you be aiming at. Usually I just hit everything that moves until they stop making noises. I find that it works wells.

Another part of the game where the word “overwhelming” fits well is loot. Almost everything that dies drops tons and tons of loot, and bags are constantly full. That’s both a blessing and curse: I never felt like I needed to wait for something special to drop, but it’s hard to feel attached to any equip when you’re changing them every 5 minutes. It was also annoying when during my around 3–4 hours of gaming I saw 4 rare pieces of equipment drop from mobs, but none was usable by my class.

I found it kinda ironic that Torchlight originally looked like a more newbie-friendly alternative to Diablo, but now Diablo simplified a lot of the mechanics for leveling characters, removing manual stats distribution and making skill choice something you can change at any time once you unlock a skill. Torchlight sticks to the old Diablo mechanics of skill trees you get stuck with after distributing points, letting players reset their skills for free until they reach level 10, but after that you better have picked the correct skills, because there’s no turning back. One could claim Diablo “dumbed down” skills, but I prefer the flexibility that lets me change my mind and my play style once I’m at a higher level.

Overall, despite these minor issues, I found that Torchlight 2 is a very fun game to play, and I’m really looking forward getting it for some coop action. Did you play as well? Let me know in the comments what you think of the game so far.

Torchlight 2: First Impressions is a post from: Kemwer Game Blog. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

Luckily I work from home, and was able to wrap my duties for the day a little earlier, so I still managed to play for a good 5 hours. Now, taking into consideration that I wasn’t logged in when the servers opened, I would say that “stress” wasn’t really the best description to this test. I would tell you how it was, but this post (retweeted by Guild Wars 2’s official Twitter account) describes exactly my experience.

I logged in, created a new Norn Necromancer, a class I didn’t have the opportunity to play before, joined the Mrs. who was already playing from the beginning, and played pretty much without any problems. I did face one bug a couple of times where the game would be stuck at 95% loading the Norn home instance, but that only happened when I tried to do it out of my personal quest. When time came to do so during the quest, the game loaded flawlessly.

The Necromancer is an interesting class to play. I’m not sure I really like the summoned pets, they die even faster than the Ranger’s, and to me make it hard to rely on them. But focusing on direct DPS makes the Necromancer an invincible killing machine. I might play it a little more over the next beta, and see which one I prefer for my third class, Necromancer or Mesmer.

I’m glad that my first impressions when reading about classes was confirmed. My main will be an Elementalist, a class that I found to be just concentrated fun in a bottle: high damage, lots of control, countless options at every single time. The Ranger is what I chose for my first alt, probably showing how much I miss playing the Hunter on World of Warcraft. Ironically I love playing it melee, which is almost never “my thing”, and not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of a ranger.

All in all, this stress test was just what I needed to relieve myself from the stress of not playing Guild Wars 2. Now I can wait a little longer until the next BWE without pulling out all my hair.

Stressed!! is a post from: Kemwer Game Blog. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

So if you hear anyone say that Guild Wars 2 doesn’t look good, feel free to point them to this image and say loudly and proud “you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about”.

Congratulations to the ArenaNet team for the achievement.

Half-million hurrahs for Guild Wars 2 is a post from: Kemwer Game Blog. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

Now this is where things got ugly. Both of us had problems, but she managed to get the installation to work after a few attempts. I, however… did not. The launcher simply doesn’t launch. I click on it, I can see the process open on Task Manager, but after 20 seconds or so it closes without even a hint of “why”. I have tried this over and over since yesterday, and it simply refuses to actually open the launcher to download the game.

I tried every single troubleshooting process imaginable to no avail. Re-installing it over the previous installation. Removing, then re-installing. Removing, then re-installing on a different drive. Downloading it again, then re-installing it. Run as an Administrator. Run in compatibility mode to every OS available. Resetting my modem to get a new IP. Updating drivers. Updating required libraries (such as dotNET). Disabling anti-virus. Disabling firewall. Manually adding a rule to the firewall. Praying to the Moon God. Sacrificing a virgin, a goat and a baby koala to the three Prime Evils so they will let me play a competing game. Nothing helps.

I’m incredibly frustrated by this. I was really hoping to give this game a try, and see if I can justify buying both Torchlight 2 and Diablo 3, specially when considering that for the price of one copy of D3 I can buy on Steam the pack with 4 copies of both Torchlight 1 and 2.

I would love to hear if anyone else out there had the same problem and found a solution.

[UPDATE]

So thanks to Killington’s suggestion for copying the installation from someone who did complete the installation successfully, I now have a running game. The launcher still doesn’t work so I can’t patch it if an update is released, but I can always get the new version again. It’s annoying, but I can finally play… as soon as I finish the job I need for tomorrow (so not today, in other words).

Download woes [Torchlight 2] is a post from: Kemwer Game Blog. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

On the other hand… I don’t want other games getting in the way of my Guild Wars 2 future extended weekends.

Source: Kotaku

BioShock Infinite Delayed to 2013 is a post from: Kemwer Game Blog. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.