While I’ve been streaming over the course of the head start weekend, a couple of viewers asked me if GW2 was any good, what I liked about it, etc. I of course said I was having a blast playing the game, and would give whatever reason was on the top of my head as to why. Now that the servers have launched properly, I got to thinking: What’s the main reason I like Guild Wars 2, what’s my favorite part? Well, here it is: Continue reading →

So, after spending a few hours wrestling with xsplit (thanks again to the person who patiently helped me out) the stream finally works as intended!

You can check it out at http://www.twitch.tv/keymakr. If you have a twitch account already, feel free to follow me and you should get an email when I go live. If you don’t, check it out! It’s a great way to keep up with some of the stuff going on in the pro circuits and to see some cool streamers (like me…*cough*…I wish).

I might be streaming some Smite tonight after work (unless I’m taking a nap for the big one tomorrow morning) and of coarse I’ll be broadcasting as I play Guild Wars 2 for head start launch (assuming I can stay awake long enough, hence the preemptive nap).

Also, on a side note, since we still don’t have an official twitter for the blog, feel free to follow me @keymakr1 in the meantime!

Stay tuned, this is gonna be a fun weekend!

With the Guild Wars 2 early access launch date only a few days away, I have a serious problem…

…I still don’t know what profession to play… Continue reading →

Just a completely random thought…

Seeing some of the sports that have been introduced to the Olympics over the years, how long until gaming is an Olympic sport? Do you think it will ever get there? If so, what do you think it needs/needs to change before it can?

More to come on pro-gaming in general, but for now -runs back to work-.

In case you havn’t seen me mention it, we are both enjoying the smite closed beta.

While its still an absolute blast to play, its still only in closed beta and definitely has its problems to sort out. Here’s my list of problems that Hi-Rez will probably end up having to wrestle with in the near future (besides the basic ‘they need more gods in the game,’ which will come in time).

• Matchmaking

So I was playing a few 5 man queue matches with a streamer last night, and decided to sit one out to get some work done and let someone else play while I watched the stream. I then watched a match where our 5 man team, all of whom were at least level 13+ (with the streamer being level 29 if I remember correctly) be matched up against a team filled with level 2-3 players.

?!?!?! Continue reading →

Hey there everyone, I just wanted to give a quick update what we’ve been up to/what were planning for the foreseeable future. Continue reading →

So last week I talked about SWTOR going free to play and I’m still not exactly sure how this will all work out. Since that news came out, however, everyone and their dog has talked about how free to play is the way of the future, and subscriptions are a dying system.

Eh, I don’t really buy that. Continue reading →

So, this past weekend I started playing in the SMITE beta. If you havn’t heard of it, it’s basically LoL/DOTA except with a 3rd person view, skill shots for everything including auto attack, and generally tends to be faster paced. I’m certainly enjoying the game, even though it does need a lot of work if it wants to stand up to other MOBA games and have a pro-gaming league, but that’s a talk for another day…

So, I’m of the opinion that gaming can be just as much of an art form as a painting,a book, or a movie and should be able to talk about religion just the same. Continue reading →

Why am I always surprised when Forbes talks about mmos?

So, BioWare is setting this up as a freemium style game. Either you play for free with some sort of restrictions and have the option to go after microtransactions, or pay for a sub and get some bonuses.

What confuses me is what’s going to happen to that initial cost to buy into SWTOR. They have two obvious options: abandon the buy in for the game, or keep it and turn the game into a semi guild wars style system. Lets look at the ramifications of both. Continue reading →

So apparently the free-to-play mmo issue has been solved! Let us all rejoice, for all of our problems have been solved!

Wait, what?

First, some background: The guys over at Cliffhanger Productions are trying to make a mmo based on Shadowrun, an old pen/paper RPG (and by old, I mean it’s older than me). From what I can tell it’s basically character classes from middle earth put into a future world, with some more awesome stuff added in. I won’t bother trying to be an expert on it, because I never played it. It sounds like it will be a really awesome game from what I’ve heard, so I’ll definitely check it out if I can.

But apparently, Shadowrun Online was purposed to be a f2p game, which got some of the backers concerned about the whole ‘pay to win’ problem in a lot of these games. So, Cliffhanger went ahead and put out the update I linked above, and now I’m here to tell you why this is all silly and won’t help. Continue reading →