My UI Going Into Shadowlands

Elv UI Set Up

I’ve accomplished, so far, a couple of my weekend goals for the lead up to WoW’s new Shadowlands expansion. I’ve gotten my DH to 50 and I’ve (mostly) fixed my UI and key binds. The bulk of my UI is done with ElvUI and the Shadows & Light addon for that. Also very visible is Details in the right corner.

Here’s the UI just flying around, then what it looks like in combat. In combat, you’ll also see a demon hunter weak aura pop up.

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Last Weekend of Shadowlands Prep

Shadowlands Loading

I’ve been slacking a bit. Both in writing this article and also doing the things that will be contained in it. I intended to write this (and start doing the things) several days ago. I was to be the “last week of prep” and not last weekend, but, here we are. This isn’t necessarily a guide for everyone, because we all have different things left to do, but it could give you some ideas to tackle before launch.

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Is it Pay to Win?: League of Legends

LoL Cash Shop

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 (p2w), such as pay for advantage, pay for convenience, and cosmetics.

League of Legends is one of the most popular MOBA games of all time. It is free to play with an earnable currency and a purchasable currency that is used to buy their premium items.

Scoring:

  • Pay for Power: 0/5
  • Pay for Advantage: 1/5
  • Pay for Convenience: 3/5
  • Pay for Cosmetics: 5/5
  • Pay to Win: 1.6/5*

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

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In Search of Fortune: Long Boi Victory and Shadowlands Goals

Ignore the big dip

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

In my first In Search of Fortune post, I declared my goal to get the bruto mount before the prepatch hit. At the time, the true date was unknown and I expected to need to fulfill the 500k quota (I had 4.5m) in about 10 days from the time of the post. The picture above is a big ol’ spoiler regarding that quest. I managed to average ~75k profit per day for that week and finished a couple of days before (what I believed) was the last day. Of course, pre-patch got pushed back weeks more and I’d have had plenty of time to get the 500k. However, I was still pretty happy with getting it done then. For the rest of this post, I’ll go over my gold goals for Shadowlands. This will be something you can come back in a year or two and yell at me if I didn’t get it done. Make sure to subscribe or bookmark or whatever so you can do that then.

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Twitch Ads (and other Revenue)

Twitch Billboard

Recently Twitch.TV (also now known as Prime Gaming) has been making changes to how ads run on their service. They have found a way (and then another way and so forth) to stop ad blockers from letting people avoid their ads. Now, this has been on ongoing battle between adblocks and Twitch but it seems the tides are turning in favor of the streaming giant and the users are left unable to circumvent the series of sponsored videos. This has led to a slew of rage-filled posts on the Twitch subreddit and elsewhere as people feel bombarded with unwanted ads. While I’m no fan of ads interrupting my viewing experience, I seem to have the unpopular opinion that Twitch attempting to ensure their ads get seen is… okay.

In this post, I’m going to discuss the if Twitch forcing ads is okay (and what would be okay if not what they are doing), their other means of revenue, and what the options mean to the end user.

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