TLEP #039 – The Morning After Overwatch Began (Rough)

Today’s podcast is a little on the rough side, I’ll admit. It covers my attempt at trying to emulate some of the people I follow on Twitter who live on the West Coast and seem to end up stay up much, much later than I can to play all of the Overwatch. It’s a pretty fun game, when you get down to it, and I don’t feel nearly as tilted when I lose than I do with CS:GO, for the reasons I’ve recently stated on this blog.

Oh, if you want to add me on Battle.net, send bcarr#1604 a request. I’ll get back to you sometime this evening. Maybe we’ll even play a few games!

In addition to Overwatch shenanigans, I also addressed some controversial, semi-trolling that I did of PVPLive’s ESPN/Riot report on Twitter.

You can find all of the podcast links, including subscription links, over at the podcast index.

I became a stoner this week… a Hearthstoner, that is.

Screenshot 2015-03-02 17.25.34

I’m not entirely sure how it came up in the mm1 Slack, but between whatever we were discussing and the fact that World of Warcraft will be adopting a PLEX-lke currency for game-time in the coming months, I figured I would go ahead and give the Battle.net client an install.

Hearthstone appealed to me on a time-waster level, but not as something I could just sit there and play for hours on end. I mean, if I did, I’d probably have to be multitasking. Since I don’t think that Blizzard will allow multi-tabling to come to Hearthstone, I would imagine that I’d probably end up playing poker or something at the same time if I really wanted to commit time to the game. However, if I’m not taking the game super seriously and I treat it expressly as a time-waster, I think I’d get the most out of it at that point.

It’s the same sort of attitude that I’ve been giving a couple of other casual mobile games from a certain developer called Supercell. Clash of Clans and Boom Beach are freemium timer-based-tactics titles. The’s a timer for nearly every aspect of the game. Want to upgrade a type of unit in Clash of Clans? Pay thousands upon thousands of Elixir and then be prepared to wait two days for your upgrade to finish. Want to expand your Radar coverage in Boom Beach? Get ready to wait for days to gather the stone needed, and then wait twelve hours to perform the upgrade. The way to escape this particular cycle is to use the gem/diamond currency that can only be used to speed up production/timers.

However, being able to play these games without giving into the need to spend real currency to skip a timer just a handful of times isn’t worth it to me. It’s not that I expect to eventually turn into a pro gamer at either game, but I just don’t want to feel beholden to the game going forward. I want the fun that I’ll have fighting other bases with my armies to be genuine and not something I feel like I just have to get used to—like the feeling I get sometimes when it comes to Destiny and paying for that season pass.

And in that way I could definitely see myself passing random bits of time playing Hearthstone and trying to make as many coins so that I could unlock all of the cards without spending money. However, Xûr’s in the bar near the hangar, and I have some strange coins to earn, then spend.