10 weeks on parental leave and back to work now for 2. It’s annoying when you delegate work and nothing at all got done. Now I have 10 weeks of work to do in a few days. Quality!

Suffice it to say I need a mental breather some nights. Lack of time means minimal investment though, so I’ve been giving F2P games a hit.  No RIFT, GW2, WoW, or any game that I can’t simply drop within 2 minutes.

The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot

This one is in open beta and a lot like Dungeon Master and Diablo in that you can set a castle full of traps and run other people’s castles. It has upgrades with timer (where the F2P stuff comes in) which is fine I guess. The gameplay is horribly balanced though where the tanky class can run through anything without batting an eye, even 6-7 levels above them. The other classes have no chance. But it’s beta and the concept is solid. Maybe in a later patch.  The file size is rather small.

Infinite Crisis

I got into the beta, which is beta.  You’re comparing LoL to a game with an admittedly limited character roster.  You might have 4 flavors of Batman but it’s still Batman.  There are technical bugs, some serious balancing issues but overall the game is pretty solid.  Community management is going to be the real kicker here.  Current playerbase is nice enough, since it’s test.  But once you get the crud coming in, there needs to be a way to filter that out.  The learning curve is extremely high but that’s expected in beta.  Oh, and it needs way more maps.

Dragon’s Crown

I don’t play a lot of console games, only when I’m on the bike.  This one is pretty solid, with a link back to the arcade D&D games.  Is it worth 60$ though?  No.  Maybe once it hits 30$.

Marvel Heroes

A new patch (1.2) fixed the defensive skills, added a ton of itemization and huge balance changes. This is what the game should have launched with. It even has 3 difficulties making the trek from 25 to 60 different than running the same zone for 20 hours. The itemization and skills are the polar opposite of Diablo3, which is good.

Diablo3

Just a few days in, tried a new Monk build. Cost me about 25 million in gear to make it work due to the way itemization works in game. And this isn’t even for hard stuff, just regular Inferno. What’s the point of upgrading gear if you need to swap nearly all of it to change builds? Maybe 1-2 pieces but not 10.

And of course the AH is going away in 6 months – likely the launch date for the expansion. It annoys me that Loot 2.0, which is what the consoles got, has been getting great reviews but the gamer base has to wait so damn long for it. Anyways, the AH simply focused on Jay Wilson’s poor direction for multiple systems. A loot system that dropped inferior gear even at high difficulty, itemization that drove stats to absurd levels to even compete, the requirement for “perfect” rolls for the item to have any possible value and a difficulty setting that made no sense. All of those systems by the way, have been or will be removed.  The game today is wildly different than launch and the console version is yet another massive leap forward.

Listen, the AH was a good concept to avoid gold farming and scamming. If I knew I could get upgrades while playing (I have never once with my monk past 60), then the AH would just be a slight nudge. When I can see that a single item on the AH can raise my damage by 10% and costs 20 minutes of gold farming time, there is a massive problem in the loot system.  Shutting down the AH is one thing, shutting down the RMAH is another, as that thing certainly brought in a sizeable amount of income.  It takes some pretty large brass to through that away – baby and bathwater.