How Much Time Played is Enough to get an Impression?

Recently I made a post regarding Amazon’s New World preview event and my experiences there. I got a lot of push back because having only played five and a half hours is apparently not enough time to give a first impression. I didn’t hit max level and do every single piece of content, so how can I have any opinions about the game? Part of me thought that it might be fanboy rage because I dared to say anything critical (despite saying overall that the game looks good), but it still seems worth while to examine the criticism.

In this post, I’m going to discuss the differences between a review and a first impression as well as what is a fair amount of time to experience a game before making some sort of judgement about the game or it’s systems.

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Is It Pay to Win?: Legendary Game of Heroes

Welcome to ‘Is it Pay to Win’ – a column where we examine a game and decide if that game is has aspects of pay to win and to what extent. Check out Is it Pay to Win?: Defined to see how we break down the components of pay to win, such as pay for advantage, pay for convenience, and cosmetics.

Legendary: Game of Heroes marketed as a free to play, match-3, card collecting, RPG for Android and iOS. Right away, you’ll probably notice some of those details indicate purchases. Mobile games are notoriously heavy-handed with their cash shops and card collection games are essentially pay to win by default in that, since their physical ancestors such as Magic: The Gathering, you spend cash to buy packs of cards. LGOH is no exception.

Scoring:

  • Pay for Power: 5/5
  • Pay for Advantage: 5/5
  • Pay for Convenience: 4/5
  • Pay for Cosmetics: 3/5
  • Pay to Win: 4.6/5*

Keep reading to see a rough game description and our basis for these scores.

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In Search of Fortune: Opportunity Cost

Opportunity cost

Welcome to ‘In Search of Fortune’, a new monthly series where I discuss my gold goals and in-game money making strategies.

So many times I’ve been told by friends about how their farm is “free”. I specifically remember early on in the World of Warcraft Cataclysm expansion, I was making money hand over fist by buying all the herbs on the AH and crafting Darkmoon cards… then eventually buying all the cards to make all of the decks. Ignoring the fact that I was making more gold overall, he insisted that his farming ore was at least as good because it didn’t cost him anything. His logic was that I had to spend gold to make my gold, whereas farming is didn’t cost any and therefore was as good.. However, I explained that my gold making took 15 minutes a day and he needed to farm ore a several hours per week to even come close to the amount of gold made.

This was when I first told him about opportunity cost:

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Streamer Report: Valactra

Welcome to Streamer Report! Here we take a look at a streamer and break down their style, the games they play, schedule (if available), achievements, and my 2 cents at the end. Subscribe/bookmark/etc here to find new streamers to watch. Also, if it’s someone you’ve seen, comment your thoughts at the bottom of this post.

Link: https://www.twitch.tv/valactra

Games: World of Warcraft.

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Shadowlands Release Delayed & Pre-patch Date

Collector's Edition WoW

Wow… so, in the end, while my release date prediction was originally spot on… the pre-patch guess was horribly wrong (it’s now slated for October 13) and with todays announcement, I’m retroactively wrong about the release date too (see wowhead post). More importantly, though, we now have more BFA than we expected and a longer wait until the new expansion… is this good?

I was just today watching this new Bellular video and… well his thoughts on the expansion state echo mine (though, since I just got beta 12 hours ago, my opinions are mostly from streamers, youtubers, and friends feedback) and probably say it better than I could… so I’ll just link the video below.

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