Wow, what a shame. I still enjoyed the game to some degree. When I last tried playing, it would cause sudden and unexpected overheating on my PC. I diagnosed and fixed the problem (Power supply, of course), then never logged back in again.
I did pretty much achieve everything I always wanted with the game anyway. I beat the cosmic trial a bunch of times. I played the content so much I could recite it from memory probably. (Don’t worry, I won’t try.)
Most annoyingly, I did not get a chance to play in the sunset hours of the game. All those eternity splinters left unspent….
I was watching the Super Bowl, and not amused by the commercials. And then something really dumb, but attention catching came on :
Which reminded me that I hadn’t played World of Tanks in – I dunno, years – so I loaded it up and found myself involved in no less than four games now, at the “Endgame”.
Ingress
I am currently dialing it back from Ingress a bit. No big operations being planned – it’s all I can do to get out to slightly out-of-the-way portals for various reasons. I am working towards platinum Mind Controller badge – only 1,400 more fields until I earn that one – especially since this badge is perfect for anyone microfielding the Downtown Burbank area. I crossed the 50 million AP threshhold this weekend.
Vikings
With a level 21 town halfway completed, and working on late game knowledge, this game creeps along. Creeps is the right word. I recently started a knowledge upgrade that had 27 weeks on the clock at the beginning. You can wait for that time to pass, or you can use the time boosters that you acquire in various methods. I burned all of them up, and am currently waiting to tick down the 10 weeks remaining for this one. And then start another one nearly exactly the same.
Marvel Heroes
Nerfs to Story XP are annoying, but not nearly as annoying as the impossible Cosmic Trial. Still can’t pass it with Captain America. Of course I have the Cosmic modes unlocked with him anyway, but I’m not playing Cosmic Patrols until I can pass the Trial. I so miss the old Cosmic Trial, which you could pass after gaining enough power. Probably the only thing more annoying than that, is most players insistence that the trial is “Easy”.
42 heroes unlocked and finishing the story, alphabetically. Human Torch is my hero today. And the story grinding continues to move me forward with Infinity points, although the creeping upwards of XP requirements is getting bad – about 290 million for the next point.
World of Tanks
The game has a new Intro movie which is pretty well done –
Standard with the game now is two rows of tanks, not just one, along with view range circles and a drawable minimap. You can sketch out what you want your teammates to do. Chat with the enemy is gone, leaving your teammates only able to rage at how stupidly you play, which they do – the socially inept will lash out at anything. I miss enemy chat.
Random platoons during gameplay is constant, giving you the chance to actually pass these missions that require platooning. I’m getting in the habit of always being in a platoon due to the personal reserves that I’m earning for the privilege, plus the chance to knock out some of those tank missions.
The XVM mod is still going strong and has tweaked the statistics in the garage very nicely –
Left side – a Tier indicator, along with the laurel leaves that tell you if the tank is elited or not.
Highest level of mastery earned.
Average damage.
Right side – Did you get your daily double/triple/quintuple ?
Count of battles played.
Win rate in %
Despite my earlier statements that I was done adding tanks to my account, I reneged, and bought a bunch of additional slots along with more tanks on sale. There’s no reason not to spend that gold I bought years ago. Now waiting for a crew training sale to add a 100% crew to my Tier VIII German arty that I bought.
And so I grind along in the game with the usual goals – padding my battle counts, earning silver, creeping crew training along, and earning mastery badges. Ace tanker is elusive, often. With over 100 battles I still can’t earn it for the Medium Mk II, a tier II pig tank that I had figured I could get it with **someday**. I gave up, and am moving along a list of low tier tanks until I actually have some silver again.
Silver is elusive if you collect tanks and mods constantly. I am beginning to wonder if the smart thing to do is simply take equipment off tanks I’m not currently running (costs 10 gold each time) and add it to the ones that I am. Probably makes a bit more sense than grinding to add it at 500k per piece typically. And currently I’m trying to get another 700k silver so I have enough to buy yet another new tank.
The year is drawing to a close. And gaming takes such a hold on my time that I don’t write that much. There are a variety of reasons for this.
Vikings : War of Clans is not a game you can write a lot about. I am back in, they did successfully recover my game for me. Each building upgrade takes about a week, knowledge upgrades are similar, and I continue to pile up the resources (aka rss) for the clan. Now, there is a new feature that’s been introduced called the Clan Stronghold, but until we manage to build it I don’t really know how it will work.
Ingress continues to be that amazing game that I’m grinding away at. I have hit 2.1 million MU captured and inch towards the 4 million goal. I’m pushing to move a lot of gold badges up to platinum, for linking and fielding, and building and destroying. But that’s not something that keeps you going day to day, given that such badges would be the work of years in a best case. It’s the strange community that you have with random strangers you meet, who become gaming friends through the game, just because you all picked blue.
Ingress really is amazing, in that it rewards a literally one-action-a-day playstyle – this helps the team, guaranteed – or a marathon of insane 16-to-24 hour a day blitzing.
But none of this is new, thus the lack of blogging. I don’t have a lot to write about the game anymore. I have quite literally covered it all – at least until I charter a helicopter to capture Mount Whitney or somesuch insane stunt. After I take back the same portal for probably the 250th time, nobody wants to hear about it, and even more important I don’t want to write about it.
Marvel Heroes continues to get playtime when I need a break from the mobile insanity. I think I have 37 heroes unlocked now. Gameplay is roughly 1) Grinding new characters to 60 2) Grinding out prestige levels when I don’t have splinters to unlock more characters, 3) Working the achievement system. Between all of these things I tend not to get bored. I remain irritated by the overly difficult Cosmic Trial. And I look forward to the “Big Update” which is “Coming Soon”, including a lot of balancing changes and perhaps an end to the Omega system.
Here’s to 2017 being a fantastic year of gaming. 2016 certainly has been.
The DCL (Dynamic Combat Level) update has gone live for Marvel Heroes, among other changes.
The new “Avengers Tower”
The new layout and overhaul of Avengers Tower is nice. The hub characters are in logical places, it’s more compact, and the dumb stuff (A huge room for terminals that no one uses anymore, etc) is all gone. I like it.
The new Story Mode leveling plan is supposedly broken and will be patched tomorrow morning – Instead of making the story mode XP be less, they seem to have made it way too high. There are reports of players reaching 1 – 60 in a few hours. I reset Colossus to green prestige, but my heart just isn’t in it for racing from 1 – 60.
The actual DCL however, is underwhelming. This is due to the changes made to the Cosmic Trial – or not made.
One of the biggest changes is the Blessing of Hela – the only blessing anyone ever used – is now nerfed hard. It made things “too easy”, which I can sympathize with, but yet this was one of the two key ingredients making surviving the Cosmic Trial possible. And the Cosmic Trial has kept me in the game all this time. Until now.
I tried out the Trial on Cable, the hero I was trying to pass it with next, and immediately got flattened. Not by the bosses – by the “trash mobs”, the first waves that you fight. I then tried on all my heroes that already passed it, with the same result. So somehow, the mobs in the Trial are tougher (probably because of DCL), your character is weaker offensively, and the trial is now laughably hard and completely out of reach. I doubt anyone could pass it now, even with 10,000 omega points.
I suppose I will want to try and rejigger my Omega points into survivability and retry, but the thought of grinding up somewhere near 10,000 just bores me. It “feels” like that is the level that will be necessary to have a chance to pass it. That really sucks.
This could, quite literally, be the end of Marvel Heroes for me. It’s been a fun run, but I am not excited about playing the other aspects of the game. I don’t believe I’ve ever quit a game because of mechanics changes before. Here’s hoping they tone down the difficulty of the Trial.
I’m a little bit late for this statistical review having just returned from Yosemite and parts nearby. Even in 2016 the Internet coverage for Verizon in the area is really bad.
Vernal Falls. No Internet nearby.
Ingress
Got a bunch of Ingress in and it remains my traveling game.
35,284,000 AP. 1.2 million for the month, not bad considering I spent a week in Sketchy Internet Land.
2,307 walking kilometers (IE, 1,434 miles), so I added 64 to this badge. That’s going to take a while yet.
1,712 Unique Captures and 3,438 Unique Hacks. Added a bunch as I traveled. And yet, not even halfway to platinum for either.
1,823,000 MU scored. That’s 28k for the month, which is really low.
Pokemon Go
In the one month the game’s been out I find myself kind of bored with it, but still playing it. Great way to kill time while waiting for an Ingress hack timer to refresh. Level 15; Caught 60 Unique Pokemon, and seen 61.
AdVenture Capitalist
They’ve changed up the game somehow – I think they’ve added additional spots for you to buy higher % efficiency for your angels. Whatever it is, it’s working – I’m at 4600 newspapers on both Desktop and Mobile, looking forward to 5000 coming at some actual reachable point in the future.
Marvel Heroes
31 heroes at level 60, and passing the cosmic trial on more of them ; Hawkeye has passed as has Black Panther. It’s all about two things to pass the trial – Good artifacts with Blessing of Hela; and Omegas. With DCL not having gone live yet I am going to try and pass as many heroes as possible and see where that comes up. The odd thing is, if they all pass it, I feel like I’ll be done with the game. And if the trial disappears I might also be done with it.
I find myself slowing down with Ingress. Having a lot to do at the office is the main culprit, but I’m also getting tired of driving around to random spots (and the EXACT SAME random spots) for the game. Still, I plan to never go below “Take one action a day, that helps the team.”
34,060,000 AP. That’s 1.7 million for the month, probably mostly early in the month.
2,243 walking kilometers (IE, 1,394 miles), closing in on 2,500 for onyx.
30,000 hacks achieved (Gold Hacker).
1,795,000 MU scored. That’s 51k for the month. Still crawling along
I need to find time to get together with my buddy – now he’s got a smartphone and is ready for me to teach him Ingress. It would be fun to play with someone else. But of course, it’s summer, there’s no time for anything so far.
AdVenture Capitalist
I am at the 4,500 newspapers mark on Earth. This is where the “guys on the internet” say that it slows down. Seems accurate to me. I should be ready for a reset soon, but in the meantime, all I’m doing is waiting a week to check on the game. That’s not much fun.
Marvel Heroes
The promised DCL is not here quite yet, but the anniversary event continues until Midnight on the July 4th holiday. This awesome event allows you to collect cake slices to make a cake – 365 needed – which then has a legendary item inside. I’ve collected quite a few.
My current activity is maxing out the Legendary items my heroes have – 20 so far. I’ve unlocked Deadpool but not levelled him to 60 yet, and I have 28 heroes unlocked. I am sitting on a ton of game currency – 1,500 splinters, tons of the various currencies like worldstones.
The Danger Room is some of the best content in the game. It’s hard if you pick a high enough level scenario (Blue or Above), and doable with the White or Green ones. I am playing as many of these as possible mostly for the Merits you can earn. I think, to pass Hawkeye on the Cosmic Trial, I’ll need many more ultimate upgrades than the simple two that he has. I need 7,500 for my first purchase, and have 2,300 so far.
June has been absolutely fantastic in the game. I wonder if I will continue to enjoy it so much without all the bonuses. Still, who am I kidding – there’s always a bonus event going on in the game. And importantly, I’m avoiding spending money because all the content I want to consume is not premium. I’ve spent a bunch already and it’s paying off.
Well, thank goodness I passed the Cosmic trial at least once.
The Marvel Heroes devs have announced a new feature designed to solve multiple problems with the game, including the one that hits me the most – “The game is facerolling easy, and trial is too hard !”
Simply put, Dynamic Combat Level scales the difficulty of the game, based on the difference between your level and the enemy’s level. If you are a level 30 hero fighting a level 15 enemy, you’ll be dealing and taking similar damage as if you were level 15.
At the end of June, it should no longer be an irritating thing to do, to level a character through the story mode. It should be more what you’d expect – a fun thing and a challenge to reach level 60. Well, we’ll see, features announced are not always what you receive.
And by September-ish, they plan on introducing a Global Difficulty Setting. With this, there’s very little reason to continue to have “Cosmic” levels, so I expect they will want to remove the Cosmic Trial.
This means, if you want the game to be harder and be more rewarded for that, you can make that choice. There will no longer be a concept of “Red Terminals” and “Cosmic Midtown” and “Red Muspelheim”, everything will be baked into the difficulty slider. As a global feature, we no longer have to make these individual regions – the entire game, simultaneously, will have a “Red” and “Cosmic” version, though we’ll likely be changing the names a bit.
Having a goal of passing the trial has been a feature of the game for me……. for forever. Months. I’m not entirely sure what I want to do in game anymore.
I messed around a lot and tried to pass the trial with Black Widow and Colossus, without doing much setup (Fail!), and with new artifacts for both of them (Fail!). I tried very seriously with Hawkeye, making every adjustment I could manage, and still was unable to kill Madame Hydra. Not quite enough offense. The demise of Cosmic Trial is not something I’ll mourn…….. but it feels very strange to see the writing on the wall for it’s death.
Losing the goal of beating the trial on all my characters is a strange feeling indeed. I’m relieved – it’s too hard. I’m at a loss – what do I do now ?
For the moment, I’m maxing out the legendary items my characters have – lots of pots of gold, and real legendaries too. I used my free hero ticket on Deadpool – seems fun, but I have so many heroes it starts to mean less and less. Collecting the legendary weapons for future assignment to characters as well via the Cake explosions. And I’ve played a few Danger Room rounds for the first time in quite a while.
I did get a really interesting result here :
Hey…. what is that…. ?
I ran a Cosmic Shocker terminal, and got the rarest of all drops : A new costume. For Rocket, while I was playing Rocket. Very cool thing to have happen.
So will I be simply seeking achievements, and grinding Danger Room and currencies from now on ? Time will tell. Maybe, of all things, I’ll find myself bored with the whole thing like so many games in the past. But I’ll stay hopeful, I think they’re trying to do things right.
As I played through Marvel Heroes, moving forward on Achievements, Legendaries, Cakes, and earning Omegas, a funny thing happened. I finally got to 4,000 points.
Well, OK. Close enough.
So I relogged onto Captain America and redistributed Omegas. Spin Tech; Melt Face; Warpath; 1 Pt Sabertooth, 9 pts Frenzy, and 1 pt Dazzler. Then, it was time to make the attempt.
Try #1. I forgot how to play the Cosmic Trial and died in 30 seconds.
Try #2. Easily took out Madame Hydra but barely got to Red Skull.
Try #3 – 7. Ran out of time to kill Red Skull.
Perhaps the Omega selection is the problem. I couldn’t really see where Dazzler was making any impact on the fight. Let’s remove it; get another Sabertooth point; and put points into my favorite cheap damage booster, Extremis Electricity. I also realized that if I was taking out Madame Hydra every time, she’s probably not the one to use the Ultimate Power on, so instead I’d wait til Red Skull.
A better use of 50 points.
Try #8 resulted in a good hit with the Ultimate Power, and Red Skull with 20% left of his health. Pretty close.
Try #9 was looking pretty poor. The Ultimate Power fired at the exact instant that Red Skull threw his shield up, but I did manage to keep a lot of the power onto his Robot Guardian. I was sure it was done……. but to my surprise, with less than 10 seconds remaining, Red Skull went down ! Cap has now passed the Cosmic Trial.
Yep. There it is again.
Next big decision is who to try for next. My instinct is Invisible Woman, or Hawkeye – it’s an important decision because Blessing of Hela is very expensive, to say nothing of acquiring the right artifacts. For now, though, I’ll think about it. Got a suggestion for me ? Comment !
The Marvel Heroes 3rd Anniversary event is pretty awesome.
The Dev team decided to reward the players with a full month of “all their specials”, IE, Odin’s Chests, Midtown Madness, Limbo, and probably other things I’m missing. Server side XP boosts as well. Then there’s the cake.
You get a full cake just for logging in once – this guarantees you a Legendary weapon, among other items when you burst it open. You can take cake slices, and assemble 365 of them into various rewards. So far, I have a free hero ticket (Unused), an extra stash page, and will probably buy cakes with the remaining slices in the hopes of getting more Legendaries.
I’ve played a lot of Midtown Madness, but also run characters through the story. And I do mean, RUN. You only have to do very few pieces of it with enough XP boost in order to get to 60, with all the bonuses you can get (The +X Spirit and Health, power points, etc). This can be done in a few hours time.
Not sure which hero to unlock next. Candidates include :
Winter Soldier – I love Cap, this is his buddy. He’s supposedly just sick when doing the Cosmic trial too.
War Machine – Already have 2 Lvl 60 uniques for him. I hear he’s pretty good.
Squirrel Girl – Gotta use that Aviator costume.
She Hulk – Has to be better than Hulk. Right ? The fact that all the powers are lawyer things is a bit of a turnoff.
Silver Surfer – He’s supposed to be cool.
Also sitting on 800 splinters – More hero unlocks I guess, although I could also get more teamups, except with so many teamups already why get more ? Now have 3,935 Omegas so I’m getting close to trying the trial again. Go Cap Go.
Recently leveled includes Rocket Raccoon and Iron Fist. Rocket is a great character. Iron Fist was pretty sucky through most of the leveling process, but I think I’ve got him down now. And currently, I’m doing the usual building up of currencies, getting good uniques, and waiting for the Omegas to hit 4,000 points.
2,150 of 2,500 kilometers walked. Almost an Onyx Trekker.
Just over halfway (5,867 of 10,000) to Platinum Mind Controller (Fields). Nothing else is even halfway there.
1,744,800 MU scored. A mere 41k in a month. That’s disappointing. I wish I was able to field more.
AdVenture Capitalist :
Nobody cares but me 🙂 , but I’ve completed the Moon. The remainder is to complete Earth on both Mobile and Desktop. I need 21 and 22 Megabucks, respectively, to unlock the 7,777 times multiplier.
It seems like it’s still slow going. A lot of people say before you can end the Earth game, the universe would die of a lack of heat, so it may never happen. But I’m going to try.
Marvel Heroes :
Currently I have two prestiged heroes – Captain America (Blue Prestige, ie, 2x) and Hawkeye (Green Prestige, 1x). 22 heroes at level 60, and 4 more unlocked and working their way up. 9 Team-Up heroes unlocked.
I think the prestiging is as good a way as any to say which ones are your favorites, and I like both Cap and Hawkeye a lot. I am leveling up Storm and have decided she sucks; but Iceman is being leveled and is a lot of fun as a Summoner. Finally, someone who can summon for me, since I have built Doom instead as a magical force.
With over 600 eternity splinters, I am wondering if I want to unlock more team-ups or just sit on the splinters. So far I’m just holding onto them – I have four more guys to level up, there’s no hurry.
The fun part of prestiging is doing it all again with a hero you like. The benefit, however, is getting costumes and trying for a random good one. Or just getting a costume via a couple of nearly impossible ways, or just for free because Gaz wants to be nice. I have an awesome Scarlet Witch costume, and a stupid one for Hulk – seriously, what’s he doing with RAM HORNS ?
I have no desire to spend more money on the game given all of that; about 1800 “G” currencies in the bank; and all the stash space I think I can use. I’ll feel pretty good about selling any uniques that won’t fit, especially given Hightown, and the ability to farm them quickly.
And the biggie – I’m close to another Cosmic Trial attempt. 3,850 Omega points, and my self imposed floor is 4,000.
To Game For Life 