It’s been a while since I posted anything! Did you miss me? For anyone who’s curious, it hasn’t been a fun three months.
Some of you may recall I have been dealing with some vision problems for a few months, but they got worse in July. After multiple appointments with doctors, optometrists and ophthalmologists (including a visit to the ER), it ended with a suspected diagnosis of a rare and scary autoimmune disease called Myasthenia Gravis. It’s a potentially life-altering condition that can be crippling to the patient, and I’ve done an unhealthy amount of research on it in the last few months. I have been anxiously waiting two months for a special blood test to be done, along with an appointment with a specialist to review the results.
Long story short — I finally went in to see the specialist last Thursday. To my great relief, the test results were negative, and the specialist assured me that my symptoms DO NOT point to Myasthenia Gravis. Instead, he suggests a different condition that causes my vision problems, which, although still very bothersome, is a far more benign condition. So now, I’m waiting for a new pair of prescription glasses to be made; hopefully it will indeed help with my vision issues.
Even though I’m greatly relieved that I don’t have this autoimmune disease, I’ve read so much about it that I feel really badly for the patients who do have it. When my vision issues improve, I’m going to volunteer to help with the local Myasthenia support group. At the risk of sounding preachy, I encourage everyone to learn about this crippling disease and offer assistance to your local patient support groups.
All this aside, I haven’t completely set aside my gaming hobby. So what’s been up with my two main games, Star Trek Online and Guild Wars 2?
STAR TREK ONLINE has been trudging along with its nonstop events and sales, and to be perfectly honest, I haven’t played this much in the last 3 months. In fact, I completely missed the 4th Campaign Event that ran in August, which leaves my progress at 3200/3500 for the 2023 Grand Prize. But not anymore! The 5th and final Campaign Event is live right now, so I’m dutifully grinding the dailies to get that finished. I should be done in three more days, at which point I will proudly show off a screenshot of my prize. Stay tuned!
There were nonetheless two pieces of STO news that I did pay attention to: First of all, in September Cryptic rolled out another tier of Experimental Upgrade. In short, by using another two Experimental Starship Upgrade Tokens, you can upgrade your ship from T6-X to T6-X2 — which adds another Universal Console slot, a Starship Trait slot, and a device slot.
Granted, Cryptic has been on this track of power-creep for years, so this isn’t entirely surprising. Unfortunately, this one feels particularly unnecessary. We’re already at the point where we’re wiping out entire enemy fleets in a matter of seconds; is it really necessary to shave off another half a second with further upgrades? I do have a few Experimental Ship Upgrade tokens in my bank, but honestly I can’t be arsed to use them this way.
The second piece of news is decidedly more dire: news broke a couple of weeks ago that Cryptic Studios is going through a round of layoffs that includes a lot of the company’s high profile staff. It sounds like most of the staff being laid off are folks who had been working on Cryptic’s failed launch of their Magic: The Gathering game, while people currently supporting their existing games like Star Trek Online are not affected, it still paints a pretty dire picture of the state of affairs.
No, I’m not going to be all doom-and-gloom about it. I don’t think Star Trek Online is “dying”, but if we’re being honest, in the last few years the game has been surviving on two things — mainly new ships, and periodic (and occasional) release of new episodes. There hasn’t been much in terms of innovative gameplay that makes players excited; the few new TFOs that did come out felt very much the same ol’, same ol’. The financial troubles Cryptic Studios is facing is only going to make things even harder for the game — I dread the day when Star Trek Online follows in Champions Online‘s footsteps and essentially falls into Maintenance Mode ™!
On the other hand, Guild Wars 2 has just seen the release of the second part of their newest Secrets of the Obscure expansion, titled “Through the Veil”. Here is the trailer below.
This new chapter of SOTO introduces us to the world of Nayos — effectively the realm of Demons. The story missions are relatively short, which only serves to bring us from the Wizard’s Tower to Nayos; the new Nayos map is not even a complete map — it’s maybe half of one, maybe a third — the next chapter will presumably reveal more of Nayos. The setting is somewhat interesting that the demons aren’t all just evil adversaries to be beaten into pulps; there is a civil war going on and we’re there to help the “rebels”. The new map introduces a host of new activities; a new group event called Convergence is also introduced; it’s an extremely chaotic melee involving large numbers of players, and like any new content, everyone is still learning it and one particular end boss can be frustrating to beat.
Regardless of the frustrations, I’m having fun with the new content!
But what’s most interesting is still on the horizon: ANet is working on new weapons masteries for each of the classes, which would open up whole new ways to build and play the current characters. The Beta test is going to roll out at the end of the month, with the real addition coming in December. I gotta say, I’m really looking forward to this addition!
Okay so I’ve rambled on for maybe a bit too long here, but it’s been a few months and I want to just catch up on a general level. Hopefully I can get back into the swing of things and post about more specific things. See y’all soon!
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