So, no so far the event isn’t awesome it’s not done yet though so there is still hope… Now, I need to decide if I should continue playing or get back to working.

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On top of that, there is the Second to Last Hit, which I usually forget to post, is probably the most time-consuming since I haven’t figured out a good workflow to go from Xsplit’s odd FLV format to something that I can use easily in Adobe Premier without first running it through FFmpeg. I did try to edit and convert directly from FFmpeg, but due to the way Xsplit sets key frames it results in the first 20 or so seconds of video being unwatchable when uploaded to YouTube. One of these days I’ll take a look back at that and see if there is a better way.

I just remembered I need to also do some edits to the layout of shindakun dot net and 25 Cent Play sites, I better get on it before I open Guild Wars 2 again…

The post Finding the Time appeared first on shindakun dot net.

For now, I’m going to relax then give another proofread tomorrow before posting it.

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eSports.

I remember way back when watching (or at least reading about since it wasn’t really easy to watch) Counter-Strike or Quake matches thinking that we wouldn’t really see this thing, watching people play video games, take off. Yet, here I am sitting in my home office on a day off watching the first day of the League of Legends World Playoffs.

I’m watching the stream on Twitch and for now the site is reporting that about 207,444 people are currently watching along. The games are also streaming on at least a couple of other sites so the total stream numbers won’t be known for a while, but they will be huge. Riot appears to be classing up the joint too with some impressive production. We had a close look at it during PAX Prime and they surely mean business going into season 3. There have been a few small missteps this time as the games are being played in an outside arena so the sun and wind are a bit of a factor.

It was bound to happen eventually, I think, with the shift over to streaming the last few years completely bypassing the need to go after a television audience. We’ve talked a bit about it on the podcast and I’m sure after this weekend we’ll be coming back to it again next Tuesday.

58XEB3KADWHE

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800 shiny new gems, now I just needed to figure out what to do with them. Jumping into the section of the trading post that requires gems I decided I didn’t want any of the items that didn’t really fit in the game. What were they thinking with that decision anyway? Sun glasses and boxing gloves? Anyway, I thought about buying a couple of boosts and quickly decided not to bother. In the end I bought two packs of mini pets for 300 gems each. After opening my new gifts I had six new pets, but one was a duplicate. That was kind of disappointing but really not unexpected.

Shortly afterward, I started to wonder just how much work it would be to get mini pets off the trading post – and as it turns out, not much. I jumped into the trading post sold my duplicate mini pet for about 20 silver and turned around and placed two buy orders for a couple of more common fine (blue) pets. Since I had placed my buy orders about 50 silver higher than the then top order it they completed in a matter of minutes. So far so good, but now I had no money. There was, however, a quick solution for that as I happened to have 250 copper ingots sitting in my bank. The ingots I listed on the trading post priced to bring in about one gold, this would set me up with a nice chunk of change – which I was about to blow on little virtual “pets” for my little virtual guy. Using the funds from my ingots I was able to place buy orders around nine more pets. At the time, prices for the fine pets, ran from about six silver to around 16 for the mini Jungle Stalker – it’d have to wait till I had a bit more coin.

I had gathered my earlier 250 copper ingots over the course of just playing the game, stopping at nodes to mine as I passed them. I figured I could spend an hour or two in the lands around Queensdale and easily pick up more copper ore. I restocked my mining picks, bringing along 500, it takes two copper ore to create one copper ingot. For the next maybe hour and a half, I gathered all the copper I could find out in the field. I wish I had timed it better but, I wasn’t thinking about the post when I started – just all the shiny new mini pets I’d have. Of course, there could be better places in the game to “farm” copper and I’m sure I didn’t run the most efficient path around the map but I did end up about 380 pieces of copper ore when I decided to call it quits for the night, after all running around like that isn’t exactly exciting. Before logging off though, I want back to the Trading Post and placed a few more orders. I checked the next morning and most of my orders had been fulfilled, a couple I had to replace at slightly higher prices as someone had come along after me and placed an order one copper higher than mine. When all was said and done I had a total of 31 mini pets, 26 then made from my time “farming” which I’m was about two hours of “work”, plus the time I had spent getting the first 250 ingots. Currently, of the “Set 1” mini pets I have all the fine (blue) ones and ten of the masterwork (green) ones. The prices start to ramp up rather quickly once you’ve hit the master work level since the rarity increases so, it would probably take a bit more farming to get enough money to continue purchasing.

So, what was the point of that? Well, that’s for you to decide, if you’ve got spare money burning a hole in your pocket and no time then by all means buy gems – and convert them to coin, which I would have done if I knew upfront I was in the market for pets. Or if you have some spare time and the want, then take an hour or two and gather up enough materials to sell for a few silver. Of course you don’t even need to “farm” you can just simply play the game, over the course of playing you’ll easily amass enough coin and gathered materials that you can get whatever you want, mini pets or other.

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Just whats going on here?

Once loaded into the map I found myself in a castle with vendors and repair NPC’s close by. Our guild uses RaidCall for communication during community events I was quickly able to get my bearings, figure out who was “in charge” and find my way to the mob. Mob’s not really the word, in-game it’s referred to as a Zerg and that fits better. Anyone who’s played StarCraft knows can imagine what it looks like when dozens of players come swarming down over all wall.

When I caught up with everyone they were on the way to a supply depot to the west of the keep spawn. We quickly dispatched the one or two player characters in the area and mowed down the NPC’s. I unlocked an achievement tier called ‘Yakslapper’ for destroying a caravan carrying supplies for one of the other servers. This is mostly how the first part of my experience went, running after the Zerg, attacking and staking fallen enemies. Awesome! So far so good, this WvW stuff is great!

No so fast, it was at the time of my first death that I realized one of the my least favorite things about WvW. Once I died I was given a choice to warp to a way point, back where you start on first loading the map. This meant I spawned, ran over to the repair vendor and then had to run all the way back to the Zerg. Which was absolutely no fun and a couple of times made even worse due to missing actually meeting up with the group as they had already moved off in some other direction. On one memorable occasion I had run the path and found everyone just in time to have the ‘raid leader’ call out: “Everyone warp back and head toward east supply.” Bah. I was just at east supply not 5 minutes ago, I ran through there to get where I was. Even with the issues of meeting up with the group though, I have to admit I had a good time – I’ll probably be giving WvW a few more goes, heck I might even start to like it.

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In the first game I spent much of my time soloing the content, that wasn’t so bad due to my on and off play style at the time though. This time around however, I decided that I would try and find a nice casual guild to join. After some searching through guild recruit posts (on the beta weekend forum I think), I came across a post about Gaiscioch [GSCH]. I wish I had saved the text, it was well written and sounded like it would be a perfect fit. So far, I’m happy to report that it’s a great guild. I haven’t had a chance to do much of the “WvWvW” or dungeons but, since I’m now over level 30 (just hit 35 today) I’ll probably look into the dungeons at least. Everyone is friendly and the sharing of resources is fantastic and did I mention one of the members, Jerich, was on Tales of Tyria today? Jerich put together a fantastic guide on crafting in game and if you play I recommend reading it.

Anyway, I’m going to try and get a couple more posts up over the next few days on some specifics but for now I need to get back in game and finish up my dailies…

The post The Guild Wars Continue! appeared first on shindakun dot net.

On the subject of dungeon crawling, I’ve also thrown up a sub-domain here on shindakun.net called dungeon.shindakun.net which I’ve started using as a “devlog” of sorts for a small project I’ve been slowly working on. It’s mostly just ramblings that I’m jotting down to remind myself since this project isn’t a main focus right now. I don’t have a playable build up just yet but it’s getting much closer. Of course my definition of playable is a bit off since you can technically ’play’ it now but, I don’t think it’s quite ready for anyone to see it. Soon though!

Anyway, I suppose I should get back to backing the site up if I’m going to re-install everything.

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