The Mind Of OverlordTomala
Gaming1

Invasion of the Microtransactions

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It seems with the latest batch of released and soon to be released AAA title games everyone wants to get on board the “lets monetize as much as possible” bandwagon.

Metal Gear Solid V’s online portion plans to make money on selling “insurance” for your Mother Base which seems like a paid cheat. Though it’s for an online portion… Then I read about plans for Rise of the Tomb Raider having 300 optional microtransactions that can shape the game to the players’ liking. Since that title is debuting on XBox One we can at least glance at it from afar and see what we can expect when it does roll over to the other platforms. But still seems rather weird considering to my knowledge it’s a single player game.

I can understand Free to Play type games doing this, like TF2. Maybe even CS:GO despite the fact that it’s not an F2P. But we’re talking games that cost $59.99 and above at launch and they expect people to pay for perks? Is this going to become the norm? I imagine this being a pain for people who have an interest in a wide variety of games. Then again this might not bother people too much. People seem to have no problem buying $900 spaceships for Star Citizen. Which if you haven’t heard of it yet, hasn’t even left the alpha stage after what… 3 years? But that’s a topic for another time. And while not a game, Microsoft has jumped on the bandwagon with their app store. I still can’t wrap my head around having to pay to remove ads in Solitare. Solitare! One of those games Microsoft threw in for free to keep office workers pretending to be productive.

But yeah, I don’t mind paying for DLC, but microtransactions to change the your play style? I don’t know…

All in an Overlord's day

Early Morning Open Thread

Not much to write. Yesterday was my day off instead of Tuesday… oops. So I went out for lunched, BS’d with friends online (as per the instructions), drank tea and did some more things involving that mask project.

Did some reading around on my usual RSS feeds and didn’t find anything really that I felt like writing about. Well, there are a couple things but I couldn’t be arsed, plus it’s one of those subjects that I want to word accordingly like ye olden days of the blog. I can save them for another day. It involves a couple kickstarter projects and hopeless fanatics who read sweetened words from their project leaders and feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

You’ve been warned.

Are you fucking serious? / Rants2

Thoughts on the latest shooting.

The whole shooting at the Umpqua Community College has been all kinds of depressing. The guy behind the shooting announced his plans on 4chan of all places, and while there were some people in the thread telling him not to do it, he was still cheered on for starting the “beta uprising”. Having read what I could of the archive before projectile vomiting I could see he couldn’t score with someone of the opposite sex. What fascinates me is the people in that thread giving their undying support, I know it shouldn’t surprise me since misery loves company and everything, but damn that’s a heaping load of misery…

But you can’t point at one thing in these cases and place blame, A lot goes into this mental behavior. Mental health care in the United States has been poor since the 1980’s, people with mental issues have problems getting the proper care they need, but they have no issues getting their hands on guns to commit these crimes. They also find people just as crazy as they are and have crazy children, then impart their mental teachings. Technology has advanced tremendously, and has made it easy for people to connect with each other, including crazies finding other crazies to enjoy each others company in their own echochambers. They become so comfortable talking like this all the time that they act out in the real world thinking they won’t get in trouble. I’ve seen guys and even some girls that fit the mold.

You know, some people say that the government is trying to control our population by using chemtrails and other means of sterilization. But that seems rather pointless when we appear to be doing a bang up job trying to kill each other.

All in an Overlord's day / Work

Back to work Open Thread

Came back from vacation yesterday, looks like they missed me… quite a bit. It was a busy day, we were pretty swamped up until I had to leave. In fact some customers didn’t even leave until right when the store closed. I couldn’t even drop the cash registers until after the store closed, usually we have it done 5 minutes til… On the brightside I didn’t get any asshole customers, but it seems like everyone else did.

All in an Overlord's day / Gaming / Vacation

Vacation Open Thread

Today is the last day of my other vacation. Not much to say about it other than it had lots of things that go boom, and I’m not just talking about gaming. We all went up river and had a blast you could say. 😀 Also had a health screening today, and apparently I’m healthier than I thought I was. So I guess that’s good?

I think I’ll spend my last day checking out the new closed beta I made it into. I can’t really say much about it other than it’s a multiplayer FPS, but it looks like it’ll be interesting. I hope it turns out to be awesome since it really seems to be up my alley.

On another note I’ve been having some fun with some Devil May Cry games in Big Picture mode. Nice Hack n Slashes for when I feel like kicking back on the couch with a controller. Speaking of controllers I’m still eyeballing the Steam Controller. It’ll be interesting to see how it handles FPS games and other types that I prefer using a keyboard and mouse with. I don’t picture it replacing the keyboard and mouse as a whole, but for Big Picture gaming it could pull through. I’m gonna wait on the reviews first before I make the investment. For a controller it seems to be at a nice price point, waaaaaay better than the $150 XBox One controller that my co-workers are drooling over.

Oh joy. You can swap the buttons around. I guess that’s… something?

Gaming

I think I found another potential addiction: Scribblenauts Unlimited

I noticed it was on sale for $5 and decided, why not? I’ve only played with it a bit but so far I like it more than I expected. I see this could be interesting, solving situations using only my imagination. I wonder how many Shoggoth’s and Cthulu’s I can flood the game with. 😛

Gaming / Server

Open Thread

So far I’ve just been taking it easy. On my first day I slept in quite a bit which I didn’t want to, but I was more tired than I realized. I’ve had to fix the TF2 servers then test them along with the Gmod ones. Spent a good amount of time on some of them today with Yutram. We destroyed n00bs and then chillax’d in the cinema watching some YouTube.

The next thing I should take care of should be the TF2 MOTD’s so that they point to the group page. Our group has expanded quite a bit since I’ve had the group page appear on each server’s message of the day.

We haven’t started working on the new hardware yet but will soon. We’re waiting for a couple RAID cards for additional storage, once those arrive we’ll be ready to install CentOS 7 and get to work adding all the servers to the new setup. Maybe even some new servers since I have plans for a few more.