Why Some People Can Never Play WoW Casually

Back to playing WOW,like most WOW Vets do, and so far I am liking it. I like how they made more WOW more casual and that you can just take it easy and still see reasonable content and gear.

But, old habits die hard and I find myself min/maxing: doing dailies to get rep, grinding heroics for that one or two BiS pre-raid gear, leveling professions to get those extra stats, reading up on Bosses of whom I may never get to see, and reading theory crafting about Warriors, DPS, Tanking, and WOW in general. I think I was top 20 best geared warrior in the realm and I haven't even stepped into a raid let alone be in a raid group.

I guess this is a problem for those who used to play WOW and are used to the demanding environment of a top end raiding guild. I asked one of my old friends who used to be in a top guild and he said he can never play WOW casually because he will always want the best items and it would just consume him that he doesn't have them. I don't think my friend is alone in this one and if you are one of the "old vets" please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Most of the folks I raided with have families now and more responsibilities and have shifted to playing WOW casually but you cannot take their

I am currently in a guild who is competitive enough that they are top 8 in the realm. I did not sign up for their regular raids as I have no more time for them but I did sign up for their 10 man group. In the end, I just want to raid be it only 10 man, see the bosses, wipe, learn from it, kill the boss, and onto the next boss.

In addition to seeing raids, I also want to get into Arenas. Last time I've played Arenas was in BC and I feel like I missed out on not playing them. I'll be making a couple posts about my arena adventures here pretty soon.

Thanks for reading and safe travels.

A week of playing the AH

It's been about a week now since I started playing the AH. I started with 300 gold and within a week I am now sitting at 10k gold. I could have had more if I didn't spend flying cold weather mount on two of my toons(soon to be 3). If you read my last few posts I was aiming for 10k gold by the end of the month! My hopes are high that I will be sitting at 20k gold come August.

I started with belt buckles but now I am starting post a couple more item like enchanting scrolls, rods, and some rare gems. I've run into some AH campers and I really don't have the time to hit the cancel button on my QA3 every minute so I just let them undercut me. I will try to slowly break into the alchemy business and get more into JC. I'll post a report on some lessons learned and AHA moments by the end of the week.

PVE wise, I am one achievement short of getting my Red Proto Drake. What sucks about it is it doesn't involve skill but pure RNG. I need to kill Moragg from Violet Hold on Heroic to finish the Lockdown achievement. I have never ever seen him come up as a boss at VH ever! Maybe once while I was leveling up. I can't believe it has come down to this but I guess it just means I need to try every day to see if I would get lucky.

Now this is just crazy.

Last night's AH adventures was a little bit slow at first but it picked up right around 11pm eastern time when most of the raids are done. Belt buckles were still selling but the one thing that is just truly perplexing are the prices for saronite ore and saronite bar.

I made a killing last night buying stacks of ore for 15g then smelting them and selling bars for 55g per stack. For some reason people needed saronite bar so I kept smelting my bars. The highest bar I sold was for 65g per stack! Considering I only invested 30 gold, heck that is an awesome deal! What makes me wonder though is the people that post the ores have the ability to make it bars yet they dont ... is it because the amount of time it takes to smelt? Or is it because they also wanna supply jcers to prospect ores? I'm not saying they should start making it bars but I'm just wondering why they just settle for ores.

I'm looking forward to this weekend mostly because I know there is going to be a lot of cheap mats on the AH. Currently sitting at 6kg, still can't believe I got this far just by investing 300g last Saturday and using my untapped crafting professions such as BS, JC, and enchanting.

Noobing it up at the AH

Last night was a decent night of AH adventures. The one thing that I sold the most last night was eternal belt buckles. I sold about 10-12 of them. At one point I was the only one selling it so I kept posting it for 50g. Considering it takes about 20-23 gold to make one belt, that's a pretty good profit.

Another surprising item that kept selling was solid sky sapphire. I bought the uncut gems for 10-12 gold, turned around and sold the cut gems for 50 gold each. I sold around 7 of them. Another excellent profit!

The rest of my sales was enchant scrolls, enchanting rods, and fishing stuff. Now I am sitting at almost 5k gold. Considering I started with 300 gold last weekend I think I am not doing so bad. My goal is to reach 15-20k gold at the end of the moment.

I would like to expand though. I have an alchemy who is sitting at 300ish skill and a tailor who is at 350ish. I'm thinking of leveling them up so I can enter the alchemy and tailoring market. My approach though will be the same as blacksmithing, enchanting, and jewelcrafting, I will try to pick 2-3 items that is not too crowded and concentrate there.

As soon I break the 20k gold mark I think I can start buying tons of cheap mats like a wannabe AH player spending around 8-10k on mats. For now though I am content with just crafting a few items and collecting around 1-1.5k gold per night.

Going for Gold

I have spent most of my gold in the two weeks buying mats to get a decent tanking gear, as such, I am bankrupt.

Last weekend saturday morning, I had 300 gold on my banker and 200g on my main. I decided it's time to go back to AH but this time I'm going to take it more seriously to get enough gold.

I currently have JC(441)/BS(440) on my main, an alt enchanter(390) and a miner(310). I started buying cheap materials to make some belt buckles

saronite ore - 13g/stack <- pretty cheap!
eternal water - 30g/stack
eternal earth - 120g/stack
eternal shadow - 160/stack

I made about 20 of them and started listing two at a time for 35-37g per belt. These went pretty fast especially during the weekend

Next up, is my enchanter. I decided to level up my enchanting and while I'm doing it I might as well buy some armor and weapon vellums. I was surprised how much profit scrolls were giving me. My best sellers these past days are SP to gloves, icewalker, +8 stat to chest, +atk gloves, and +def to chest.

After collecting profits last weekend. I decided to buy the recipe for +24 stam gem as I notice there are hardly any posted. Bought a stack of cheap rare blue gems, cut them, and posted two at a time. I sell them for around 45-65g. I can't touch the epic gem market since I am not 450 yet, I should be though in the next couple days or so.

I've just been messing around with the three professions I mentioned above in the past couple days and I must say I am both enjoying the AH experience and of course the gold waiting for me on my mail box.

As of last night I was sitting at 3400 gold on my bank alt. I only gained about 3k gold but you gotta remember I started with 300 gold last saturday plus I'm a complete beginner.

What I need to work on:

I need to have a system down, switching characters back and forth only to find out that I missed and item to send can get really old. I am new at this so I guess this is normal?

Adding on to the item above, I need to have a list and a spreadsheet of some sort to keep track of items that I need to craft and hopefully see a pattern of what items sells when.

Lastly, I need to get my alchemist up there. I think my hunter(lvl 62) is at 305 alchemy. I need to get it up there so I can break into the herbalism so I can start transmuting.

I need to be patient and intelligent on how to deal with AH campers. One already on to me on my belt buckle business. He keeps undercutting me and even sent me a message saying he is gold capped and he will drive the price down. My reaction? I just posted the belts and let it sit at AH as I know they will sell. One thing I should have noticed though is he kept cancelling his auctions whenever he'd post a new one(maybe those were the same items he posted?) If he goes below mat cost I will definetely buy them.

My goal before July ends is 15k-20k gold. I'm new at this and I'm learning along the way. Hopefully once I have a system and have more gold to invest, my earnings per day would increase exponentially.

Kingslayer

Last monday night my guild didn't have enough people to try H LK 25 man. So one of my friends started to form a group for normal LK. I asked if I can join and BAM I got the invite. Mind you that I just got back from a long break(since march 2009) and just got back about 2 weeks ago.

With my 5400 GS, my friend told me to tank LK at the beginning. He procedeed to give me the lowdown of the fight for a couple minutes. It was my first time being there and I haven't read up on the fight so I was just following instructions on the fly. I

On our third try, we got LK. Granted most of the guys are overgeared for it but hey I was grateful that they let me tag along, see LK, get Kingslayer, and then get a token to upgrade a T10.

Whats funny is I've seen Lich King dropped but I haven't seen past PP, lol? Also I don't have enough frost emblems to buy a T10 that I can upgrade ...

I got the Kingslayer title but I won't be sporting it till I see the whole instance. I'll stick with my server first titles for now =).

Thanks for stopping by.

Hacked

About a week and a half ago, not even two weeks of playing WoW since I came back, my account got hacked. I am pretty good with PC and Internet security so the only reason my account has been compromised that I can think of is the critica/serious security with Adobe. If you haven't updated to 10.1 do it now. I am surprised they didn't do much effort in getting this info out more to the public. You can read about it at the technical services at WoW official forums.

Getting locked out of your account and running naked and poor around dalaran is such an awful experience. All my lvl 70+ toons got stripped. My lvl 62 DK though was not naked though so I just played that toon while waiting for my account to be restored. Blizz sent me a mail saying it takes about a week or so but they managed to give me my items back 2 days early. Because of this event, I ordered an authenticator. Took about a week to get here. I've scanned my pc for malware, spyware, keyloggers, viruses and the likes and looks like my PC is clean. Hopefully this incident won't happen to me ever again.

Back to Azeroth

Hello to anyone reading this!

About a week and a half ago I decided I'd give WoW another shot since my summer classes are about to end and I figured I mess around and see what new things WoW has to offer.

All I can say is ... Whoa! The game is totally from the game I left last year March(Ulduar wasn't even out). The very first thing that I noticed is the Dungeon group finder. Holy shit that thing is nice, granted there are some negative effects on the community but overall it is pretty awesome.

My first week

I started the quest where you need to run FoS->PoS->HoR. Those 3 new instance are pretty fun and what's important is it can be finished around 30 minutes or less.
So I'm all excited but I noticed that the queue time for a DPS is around 14 minutes! Holy crap! So wanting to do more heroics I decided to bust out my 4k GS tank gear and start queuing up(not sure if less than 3 seconds would count as a queue) as a tank which brings me to ....

What the hell is up with GearScore? When did this Sh!t start? When I left there was no such thing! Only requirement was know your class and be able to follow instructions and adapt to different situations. I hate it to be honest as most groups tend to overgear it.

When we got the realm first for clearing Naxx or realm first for clearing Obsidian Sanctum, we didn't have the gearscore addon but we did do a check of gear. Our officers made sure we had the best enchants/gems and gear from heroics. I hate it how your gear score defines your for some players. Sigh, I guess this addon is here to stay ... /rant off

Ok back to happy place now

By the end of the first week I managed to amassed a good amount of emblems that I used to buy tank gear so I can tank some more. I also cleared the heroics versions for the 4 new instances. I have to say that they are very well done.

I also started doing Argent tournament dailies, now these are something new to me. I am currently one quest away to be open up the dailies for the champions

Second week
Not much upgrades for me since I have bought most of the emblem gear. I'm sitting around 4850ish GS. Only thing I want are specific drops which is starting to be a pain in the ass. My goal is to get as close to 5k GS so I can start getting invited to some random pugs for ToC 10/25.

Rekindled interest in Raiding
I also found a couple of my former guildies. I talked to the GM of their guild and as of last night I am a trial member with the recommendation of my former guildies. My problem is my gear, the only thing they have left to do is H LK 25 so you can see a pretty big gap in the gear right there. GM mentioned he first needs to see that I am willing to raid and of course see how I do. I don't expect being handed H ICC 25 gear, only thing I asked is that hopefully they have alts that will need a low geared tank like me to tank like TOC or something.

I need gold!
I started looking at my professions and decided that I want to have lots of gold. I only have about 8k gold so I need to invest those and hopefully get around 50k by the end of the month. I just wnat to be ready when Cata hits.

As you can see I'm pretty excited coming with all these "new" stuff for me and I can't wait to explore the new raid dungeons. I will keep posting updates on my toon(s) and my gold making adventures.

Another State of the Gamer post

How is everyone doing? I haven't been playing games for awhile so I can't really blog about games =(. I've been busy at work as construction projects are starting to pick up and at the same time me and the wife has been working on buying a house this spring.

I've been playing COD:WaW but only when I get a text from my old friends. No new animes to watch lately really so it's been kinda boring in that department too.

It's been 2 weeks now since I last logged on WoW. I can't really find a strong reason to push myself to log in, old guild went poof and most of my friends being gone ain't really helping. I have cancelled my account and I will be waiting till the Ulduar patch comes out and hopefully still have a raid spot in my new guild =p.

I have been watching alot new Tv shows though. We started watching NCIS Season 6 via netflix (it's HD!) and I must say the show is entertaining. Started CSI:NY and so far it's ok.

Also my interest in MMA has been renewed. I was a big fan of TUF Season 1 and also have watched some fights on UFC, Pride, and WEC. Over the past week or so I got a hold of UFC 90-96 PPV fights(don't ask me how!) and WOW these guys are beast!

UFC 97 is about a week away and I'm still contemplating if I'm going to shell out the cash for the PPV. I really want to watch Anderson Silva beat the shit out of Thales Leites and of course watching Chuck fight is just pure awesome. I think if I don't have any excessive spending this month I can get away with it =).

Got Hacked

Some bozo charged my debit card $147 to some company in London called Elustra LTD. Really?! I looked them up and no number and website to reach them ... nice.

I have been using my credit card online since 2003 and I haven't had this happened before ... so I guess I can eliminate what websites that I used for my primary suspects.

What's funny is how I discovered it. I was doing our monthly expenses early this morning and the fraudulent charges wasn't there yet. 30 minutes later I checked my account again and BAM! There it is! I called my bank and had my card cut off. I stopped by my bank during lunch time, got a new card and submitted the complaint and they said it can take 3-60 days till they can give me my money back.

I'll be doing a sweep on my PC again and now have to go thru all the sites that I have auto pay on ...

Also found a charge for $1 from Itunes ... I gotta call them up today and see what's going on. It's not about the $1(ok maybe it is a little bit) it's the principle!

State of the Gamer

I've been thinking about cancelling my WoW account for a month or two until Ulduar comes out but I'm not sure if I have already paid for the next month's bill ... if I did then I guess I'll just work on fishing heh.

This last weekend I've devoted alot of time into Call of Duty: World at War due to the new map packs and double xp weekend. I managed to get to my 3rd Prestige and currently on lvl 37.

I also tried out some interesting Perk Combos that other's have recommended. Check it out.

1st setup - this is my usual setup. Pretty standard.
MP40 with dual magazine.
1. W/e
2. Stopping Power +40% dmg
3. Steady aim/Martrydom


2nd setup - I've played with this setup last weekend and I must say even w/o stopping power the mp40 still dishes out enough damage. I really like this setup cause it tailors to my run n gun playstyle most of the time.

MP40 with Dual magazine
1. w/e
2. Juggernaut - +40% health
3. steady aim -

3rd setup - the ultimate stealth setup! I can't go rambo with this setup well ... I can but it's not gonna be pretty. This works awesome when I can flank an enemy and find a good spot to shoot them while theyre busy shooting someone else. I don't show up on the radar when I'm shooting or when they have a recon plan so it's been fun sneaking up on people.

MP40 with Silencer
1. Bouncing betty/claymore
2. Camouflage
3. steady aim

I've also played around with putting Double Tap on the 2nd perk, it's ok so far but I really think it depends on the map and who am I playing against to time when to use it. It's a nice change if anything.

I still have to get around completing challenges for about 4 weapons, I've been using MP40 alot which I know is not healthy =P.

COD WaW Patch First Impressions

Yesterday there was a patch and a map pack released for COD: WaW. There was some pretty nice fix like

*Improvements have been made to the global spawn system – players should never spawn within the line of sight of an enemy.

Well the only problem now is they spawn behind you! =)

All the rest of the fix seems pretty fair. I would have liked though if they

There was some issues/problems last night that I encountered though:

Xbox live account management was down - The day that a bunch of people needed microsoft points to purchase the map pack was the same day the server decides to crap out. Brilliant! Granted there is a sudden influx of people

Kept getting kicked out of the party - Well my screen says they left the party and when I asked them they said that I was the one who left hmm.

New maps not showing up! I get the fact that the game picks random maps for you but 3 hours of playing and not playing at least one of the 3 new maps ... whats up with that? Anyone able to play the new maps so far?

last issue is not a technical problem but more of a user ...

I seem to be having a hard time aiming my weapons. I blame it on my controller or slow reflexes in the past couple days resulting in a not so spectacular kill death ratio. It's either I'm starting to suck more or the players I'm meeting are getting more skilled OR both!

There is an issue with my controller's right stick. It's sometimes lagging behind or just slow, I can try a different one but that means I gotta use my wife's pink 360 controller ...

Did I mention it's DOUBLE EXP weekend again? Holy crap these guys are giving away exps like candy. Well I can't let this weekend go to waste then =P. Time to come up with another excuse play COD all weekend again ....

COD5 Patch day!

Thanks to http://www.ps3blog.net/ I learned about the details concerning COD5 patch.

Here are some details about the patch.

*All rifle grenades fired during the first 15 seconds of Search & Destroy will be duds to prevent griefing in that game mode.
*Improvements have been made to the global spawn system – players should never spawn within the line of sight of an enemy.
*Players who equip the Bouncing Betty and melee teammates in Hardcore game modes are now credited with a team kill penalty.
*Players are now deducted 200 points for team killing the bomb planter/defuser in Hardcore Search & Destroy.
*Martyrdom no longer causes “direct impact” grenade deaths in Hardcore modes.
*Players ranked higher than the maximum allowed in the Boot Camp playlist are no longer able to play in games with lower ranked friends in that playlist.
*“Bayonet jumping” has been disabled.
*Further improvements have been made to geographical matchmaking.
*The “New” icon clears when a player has viewed an unlocked weapon X360 only.

Overall good patch imo especially the rifle grenade and respawn camping issue also add to that there is a new Map pack. Hopefully what's left of my microsoft points will be enough to buy it.

Me and my buddy are thinking about playing COD4 in between COD5 games especially when the Double XP weekend comes around. It's usually just the 2 of us and another strong player would be very much welcomed to our duo party. So send me an friend invite if you are interested in playing either COD4 or COD5. See you guys online!

Blizzard's Mega Patch

I have started downloading and I checked earlier and it's at 40%. I have started this process couple days ago and it's getting around 2-3% for a good 4 hours that I let my PC download it for the past 2 days.

Anyone else having trouble with this?

In other news, I've been swamped at work and haven't really played some games this weekend. Me and the wife have been busy looking at houses/neighborhoods. The lease on our apartment is going to be up by June so we figured we start early in looking for a house.

There's always a first time for everything

Last night I filled out my first application to a Guild. On all the guilds I have been in I was one of the forming members, was asked if I was interested in joining, or I just simply asked if there was a spot and got a ginvite from there.

It really felt weird writing the app being my first time and all. I've always been on the other side watching raiders putting their self out there in the hopes of joining our ranks. I've never made fun of anybody though so I hope that's good Karma =). How was your first experience apping to a guild?

If I don't get in then I don't get in and if I get kicked out of my current guild cause of my application well w/e I don't care. I think I can get in to a decent guild if I really wanted to. The guild that I'm apping is one of the best in the server and 3 of my friends from Renascent is in there so a familiar face would be awesomesauce.

EDIT: You can view my first time app and laugh it up over here.

Also I logged in on Killzone 2 last night and I got a special Icon on my rank because I was one of the top 7-10% players last week, they change it weekly. Wowza! Really?! This is a first getting an award for being one of the top players on a FPS. Wasn't expecting that at all. I've only played for about 3-4 nights last week but I did get a streak where I was either first or second scoring massive points in kills. /cheers

You can also view my Kz2 profile over here.

Update - added a link for my app online and KZ2 profile.

Your asian aren't you?!

I keep getting that question especially when I was still leveling characters in WoW where I usually am one of the faster levelers and able to stay up for a long period amounts of time. Even now I still get it when playing shooters.

If you ask me I don't really know why asians in general have +5 to Fortitude in gaming and +10 in Farming gold. In real life though most small business are started by immigrants like me =P.

Well for those racist out there here is a pic for you to mull about.

XP/Progress bars and achievements

Well WoW has been kind of slow for me these past few weeks but ... I managed to finally finish some of the achievements/goals that I was slowly working on.

#1 White Polar Bear! - All I can say is finally!

#2 Exalted with Kaulak - took about a weeks worth but now I got my epic fishing pole!

#3 Get Northern Vanguard achievement - I was able to finish up Argent dawn last week.

Next on the list

#1 Level up fishing so I can get the achievement "Skills to Pay the Bills".
#2 Raise another faction to exalted - Preferably Oracles for a chance to win the green proto drake.
#3 Level up another alt

Plan that got aborted
My plan for the weekend was to play Killzone 2 with my fellow clan mates and finish up Naruto: Broken bond so I can actually ship it back to Gamefly and get a new one but alas all that planning was went out of the window when I found out Saturday afternoon that it was Call of Duty:WaW double points weekend! It's too bad I found out Saturday afternoon ... if only I knew about it earlier like Friday night I could have amassed more points

My Carrot on stick ... whats yours?

All of my actions in game be it WoW or shooters was dictated by one major variable ... rewards or a sense of accomplishment.

In CoD you can rank up all the way to lvl 65 and have a bunch of achievements that you can do. After hitting lvl 65 you can then "Presitige" mode erasing all your achievements, unlocked guns, perks and starting over at Lvl 1 in exchange for a different icon besides your name! You can do this up to 10 times and get a different icon each time depending on how many times you have "presitiged". Doesn't sound fun right?

A gamer addicted to XP Bar

This is a really great example how I am sucker on games that have xp bars

During my first playthrough I thought I would stop at 65 and not Prestige. I wasn't even lvl 65 yet but I have already finish most of the in game challenges(like achievements). As soon as I hit the max lvl I then decided to just keep prestiging. Seeing my progress bar reset for in-game challenges and xp to level up was not as bad as I thought. It gave me something to look forward though. The only thing thats sucks is losing my weapons but I'll manage.

Note though that 90% of the time I only play when my friends call me to play the game. When I'm by myself it just feels like I'm grinding for points. So because of the double xp weekend me and my buddies spent about 10+ hours playing this game. Kinda silly? Yes. Immature? Yup. We had fun? Hell yeah.


Coming Soon
Also my project for recording games might come to pass on the month of April. I already spend 40 bucks for a Bluetooth headset so my next extra expenses will be taken from next month's budget. Anyway expect some videos from the games I am currently playing be it WoW or console games.

Finding the right guild and the right loot system

My old GM from Renascent left the guild that I am currently in. It was because the Loot council mentioned that they would give Betrayer of Humanity to a DK alt instead of giving it to him until he proves himself. Sounds fair right?

Well the catch is he was recruited not just a raider but to help lead raids. So he is more like a sub officer or some sort. And in the raids that he was in he was helping on raid leading specially when doing Sartharion with drakes. So you would think that any guild that wants to progress pve that those efforts would be enough to warrant an upgrade to a main raider rather to an alt right?

I remembered that this guild is more of a pvp centric guild. Where most officers are heavily into arenas topping the BGs as high as ranking 2nd overall. And of course I found out that the DK alt is in their Arena team! AHA! Now the plot thickens...

My GM left right after the Naxx raid last Wednesday night. I don't blame him really.

I really dislike guilds doing loot council who has no clear purpose or hidden agendas. That loot system worked for us because we had leaders who know what they were doing and were genuinely committed in being the best PVE guild.

I have gotten several tells about applying for another guild so I checked out other guilds. To my surprise I already found 3 guilds who are recruiting DPS warriors. Now that's news! I really have a good WOW rap sheet(lol?) and I believe I can easily get into one of them if I really tried especially with my experience and current gear.

The problem is I don't want to be labeled as a guild hopper ... maybe I'll try sending my application via pm on their forums. I also have to check if I will get along with them.

I really don't want to be with jerks and players who think they are the shit, calling other players nub, baddies, stupid etc. I don't like it for 2 reasons. First, it's just not cool acting your the best and the rest are scrubs. Second, I was in the best pve guid ... and I find it really funny hearing it from them calling other names and then when the raid starts they have no FUCKING clue what to do or how to avoid fires and lava waves.

I will prolly hang out with this guild for a few more days or maybe I'll be here for a good while ... I don't know. I'll look for other options this weekend.

Me and multiplayer games

One of the best things about Multiplayer games are the players, at the same time they are one of the worst things that has happened to the same games.

When my old guild decided to implode I was really thinking about quitting WoW. Losing my friends was really a bummer and I really don't wanna bother applying to another guild, server xfers etc. I was really glad an old friend hooked me up with a new guild where about 5 players from Renascent are members. It's not much but it was enough for me to keep playing. Just doing daily quests ain't going to cut it.

I got a whisper from a priest from my old guild asking me what was my plan. I really felt bad because I know he still wants to play but like me a couple days ago he is guildless. I wish him all the best and hopefully he founds a place to call home.

Meet my new Clan! The Mockers

My buddies who are playing Call of Duty(COD) are only on 1-2 nights a week and I would really like to have another group to play with on top of my COD team. I decided to purchase Killzone 2 last Friday and so far it has delivered. But I really want to meet other players, be more social, get some clan action going on.

I searched for a ps3 blog and voila I found one that is looking to add members to their clan to play with/against each other. I got the Clan invite yesterday and I gladly accepted. Heck I even bought a bluetooth headset to talk to my new clan, the headset btwy is awesome. I bought the used one to get 10% off and I got another 10% cause I had a Gamestop Card wooot! Saved me about $15. They had their first games as a clan last night but I didn't make it because Naxx raid was scheduled first >_>. I'll definetely be there next time though.

I will still play COD:WaW when my friends are online but I will be devoting my free game time in playing Killzone 2 in the next few weeks. If you have killzone 2 or planning to get one and you want a clan to hang out, check out our Clan see if it fits you.

Killzone 2 First Impressions

This is not a MMORPG post but if your interested in what I have to say on PS3's latest shooter read on!


Pros


Addictive ranking system, medals and ribbons. Give me an XP bar to track my progress and I'm in! Perfect carrot on stick. The medals and ribbons ala achievements are just plain awesome. The game also gives a special badge that you can show off if you are one of the top 1,3, 6 and 10% players in the game, they update this weekly.


Playstyle choices - Killzone 2 accomodates most playstyles. From Rifleman, to medics, engineers, snipers, and squad leaders. You'll start out as a Rifleman but as you rank up certain badges/classes will be available to you. Last night I decided to be the Medic and it was hella fun. I had my assault rifle ready but as soon as one of my teammates go down I'm right there to revive them! I just recently unlocked the Engineer badges where I can set up bot sentrys that will guard an area the only downside is I only get a shotgun, I can always pick up others people gun though.


Stunning graphics. Easily one of the best looking First person shooters out there. Seeing your shadow as you run thru an alley just makes you smile.


It's just plain fun. Maybe because it just released last friday but I don't think no one can say that this game failed to deliver. Yes I do get frustrated in playing this game from time to time but it's not because of gameplay mechanics but rather it was me who was trying to Rambo my way in thru 4 opponents.



Cons


My biggest gripe is that I can't remap my buttons. Seriously most players will use the default control scheme but for players like me who like to reconfigure control layouts ... please give me an option.


My 2nd issue is the framerate. There would be times that frames AND controls feels sluggish. This is not game breaking though. I only encounter this when I'm on a 32 player mode and everybody is just everywhere not all the time but 1 in 8 games would be my guess. To counter this sometimes I would pick games with the max of 16 players which is just perfect.


Last but not the least are the spawn points. You know it really sucks to run for a mile just to get back into action but I have a good guess why they did it *cough spawn campers*

Overall

It's not perfect but gameplay, pace, graphics is just right. It's another damn good reason to keep playing first person shooters. I give it a 9/10.




Progress so far


I haven't played Killzone 2 as much as I would have liked last weekend because my buddies from COD:World at War are evil and wanted me to play with them. So I did and we had tons of fun.


That being said I still managed to get to the rank of Captain and get 8/8 Good conduct medals, 8/8 body count specialist, 8/8 kill specialist, 1/8 sidearm specialist heck I even managed to get a 3/8Medic Ribbon!


I plan on spending more time playing this week. Finishing the campaign mode would have to take a back seat as I would like to ride the wave of the influx of players on the first few weeks aka more nub kills. I would also like to complete the 8/8 Medic ribbon so I get the medic's secondary ability. From there I will level up my engineering badge then sniper! A headset would be nice but $50 bucks(blue tooth) is kinda steep.


I'll do another review a month from now to see where the game has gone, hopefully the game is still in good shape and I'm done with the campaign by then.