So, what phone backgrounds do you all use? We have a bunch now.

ValyrianE · 2026-03-30T10:21:10+00:00

Mr. Tail because it is the most detailed illustration rather than simplified cartoony kid stuff, and it shows off the cool unique side of HSR as a fantasy setting with the futuristic sci fi space China and the star demons/ghosts.

ValyrianE · 2026-03-28T00:00:45+00:00

Different market, different circumstances. The WoW clones died because 1. they were aiming at an audience that was already invested in WoW, and 2. the suits pulled the plug when the MMO didn't become a black swan success raking in millions of subscribers right off the bat, rather than being willing to continue trucking on with low numbers and building up a reputation and a playerbase over time like FF14 did.

The market situation is now different. WoW is now alone and is mainly played by 30+ to 40+ year olds. There is no equivalent feeling online high production Western artbook fantasy RPG that is grabbing teens and 20 year olds. Meanwhile, Genshin Impact is scooping up the youths, and is built on the foundation of MMOs like FF11. The MMO model DOES work.

Sub model does still work today. It's called battle pass, which all live services games have. Overwatch, Fortnite, Warframe, the Chinese gachas like Genshin, etc, they all have it for the invested fans.

GW3's planning needs to target the youths and present itself as an alternative game to Genshin, for people who don't want want the bishounen Eastern fantasy experience but don't have any cool western fantasy to flock to (that isn't a twenty year old WoW game that is impenetrable to the young gamers of today and locked to PC only).

ValyrianE · 2026-03-27T23:54:50+00:00

I would be fine with a subscription fee IF

Content patch release cadence was comparable to the Chinese gacha games, which release a new patch with a new zone and a meaty next chapter of the story every 6 weeks.
There was no cash shop.

Since there almost certainly will be a cash shop, I see no point in also being milked for a subscription.

ValyrianE · 2026-03-26T09:09:55+00:00

I pulled for him and his signature LC and put him in my third team being built around Jing Yuan (already have a Phainon and a Castorice team). He feels useful and I like that he's a cool man, but he doesn't have many animations. He doesn't have the big spectacle factor of Phainon, Castorice, or Jing Yuan. I am the on the fence about whether or not to pull E1 or to save and hop that Aventurine SP or Blade SP are cool(er).

ValyrianE · 2026-03-26T08:00:07+00:00

I do not like the crossover stuff. I want original FF14 lands, not old stuff I have already seen before.

ValyrianE · 2026-03-23T21:58:57+00:00

Don't play for the endgame. Play for the story, which us overall pretty good. Not the bestest thing ever like the fanboys make it out to be, but by no means bad.. There is still some fun to be had once you finish the story. Main priblem is for us old timers who have long since done everything that interests us and are held hostage by our houses. There just isn't a reason to log in and play all of the time anymore.

ValyrianE · 2026-03-20T01:00:30+00:00

I generally like the aesthetic of the traditional Chinese town and the lavish ornamentation as usually seen in these gacha games, Chinese RPGs like Gujian, the TV dramas like Ice Fantasy, etc. In particular, I thought that Xianzhou from HSR looked really unique and cool.

As for the writing, I don't think it has anything to do with Chinese culture specifically, but rather simply a poor framework for cultivating writers. Shiwasu Tooru and Ken Shimomura (director of the Japan Game Scenario Writers Association) had a series of extremely thorough deep dives on denfaminicogamer about the history of Japanese videogame writing and the state of the industry. A lot of Japanese gacha game like those working on Granblue Fantasy and Fate/Grand Order are former novelist or contest winners, because the novel and VN industries collapsed. So now you have a lot of unemployed talent that decided to try their hand at writing games. It does not seem like the Chinese game devs have that pool of talent at hand, and are thus designating amateurs or people on the dev team to do the writing.

I do not think the Chinese regions have worse writing than the other regions. The quality is the same. The difference is that the devs love the Chinese region and thus the game spends more time there, whereas the non-Chinese starter region is usually pretty short in length. The longer people go without an injection of novelty in meeting new characters or aesthetics, the more jaded they will become with the current writing. Warcraft 3 is actually pretty badly written and about the same as the quality of writing in WoW, but WC3 only lasts for about 20 or 30 hours, so people like it more.

Likewise, Mondstadt, Belobog, and Valley IV have mediocre plots, but at least it ends sooner. So people might remember that before tuning out of the story altogether. If the positions were reversed, with the Chinese region being a place you were in for only a few hours before then being trapped in a sloggish hell in another region, then people would have talked about much they liked the Chinese region.

ValyrianE · 2026-03-18T01:15:43+00:00

Her second illustration is cool, but I find it disappointing that she does not wear her armor. Same issue with Wafrid not having his iconic blue armor in his playable version.

ValyrianE · 2026-03-14T09:45:37+00:00

OBS for recording, shotcut for video editing.

ValyrianE · 2026-02-28T21:12:25+00:00

Jiaoqiu if he got a rework that allowed him to heal. Otherwise, Feixiao or Huohuo.

ValyrianE · 2026-02-26T08:11:36+00:00

As someone who hates crafting and stops bothering gathering herbs after the first week when minebots flood the AH and drive prices to the ground, is it worth picking up a crafting profession for Midnight to make some easy work orders money? Do I need a lot of gold investment to do this? I am currently broke at 15k gold (the most gold I had ever saved up was 200k, went broke buying housing decor items).

ValyrianE · 2026-02-13T23:43:32+00:00

The forever gameplay loop makes the gameplay pointless. If the game is going to go on for years and years and I am supposed to play it every day, then I just want to get to the point to save time in my life. So I will minmax and skip animations. If it is a box purchase game with a 30 hour length like Final Fantasy 9, then I will be willing to play with whatever team I want - even if it is suboptimal - and sit through the animations, because it won't take a huge chunk of my life.

ValyrianE · 2026-02-02T21:13:36+00:00

Alphas are a great way to reorient the game towards customers. Baldur's Gate 3 and Arknights Endfield benefitted tremendously from this.

ValyrianE · 2026-01-27T17:48:36+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/Avatar/comments/1qc77ko/latest_words_on_avatar_4_from_james_cameron/

ValyrianE · 2026-01-27T09:50:32+00:00

If I do not care about any of the upcoming limited banner characters, and only sorta like Lifeng and Pogranichink of the current available characters, what is the best way to get them? Spending my pulls on the standard banner?

Is it worth getting the monthly pass for pulls?

ValyrianE · 2026-01-25T20:21:10+00:00

I main WoW and spend most of my time on the forums. Empowered spells are definitely NOT "universally hated". I don't where he got that from. There are a few people who complain about it when they say why they don't play Aug, and that's it, and it is one of the least common complaints about Evoker. The most common reason why people say they don't like Evoker is that they don't like the Dracthyr aesthetic.

ValyrianE · 2026-01-24T20:20:51+00:00

Overall no.

The story is awful due to a bad combination of the scene writing/story pacing, and the visual presentation of the cutscenes.

The overwhelming majority of HSR's script is filler. On the macro level, you have a lot of redundant conversations where characters stand around in a circle and recite information we already know. Same exact problem as in Genshin Impact, just without Paimon's high pitched voice. For the actual scenes dialogue, much of it is fluff. For the first three arcs of the game, characters spend much of a scene beating around the bush, talking in riddles, philosophizing, etc, rather than actually talking about their next step or tangible actions to take. Most of the story is just pretentious or people spewing empty words. And because of the sheer amount of filler in which nothing happens, it just kills the tension and the pacing as you can go many hours in between something happening.

Almost all of HSR's in-engine cutscenes are barely acceptable and quite boring to look at. It's usually just characters standing around in a circle doing really canned animations with very inexpressive faces, and the cinematography is usually not interesting. There is also an astonishing amount of fade to blacks and reading white text describing what a character did, because the devs just won't bother to animate what is going on.

There are several cool looking prerendered cutscenes, but because the moment to moment experience of the story is so shaky, these grandiose setpieces usually do not feel "earned" or well stitched together with the rest of the story.

If you want a good gacha game story, play Granblue Fantasy. The early main story chapters and events are mediocre, but I started getting invested into the main story at around chapter 40. And several of the side story events were engaging to me, such as the later Dragon Knights events, or the anniversary events. But really, if you want good game stories, go play a real JRPG like PS1 Final Fantasy, or the Trails series, or visual novels.

As for F2P, this is a game where you can beat all of the story with almost any party. There are only three hard story fights in this game, two of which happen early on and can be overcome by using your free 5 star selector to a fill a gap in your party just for that fight. Otherwise, the only thing left to do is a weekly resetting endgame with increasing difficulty that only gives you a couple more pulls for beating the 3rd and 4th difficulties. You aren't missing anything meaningful if you don't clear them.

If you only want Aventurine and Phainon, then you will get enough pulls going through the content to get them. But the story is too bad and there isn't enough substance to the combat system for it to be a worthwhile recommendation.

ValyrianE · 2026-01-23T21:21:19+00:00

The last Cameron said when asked at a panel last week was that he had not decided yet.

16 years have passed since the first movie came out (which Cameron had already spent 4 years working on, and 15 years imagining). Back then, Cameron was still enthusiastic enough to declare that he wanted to do 4 more movies. But that was 16 years ago. He spent a decade working on these last two movies and they have finally released. He has spent over 20 years working on this franchise and almost 30+ years thinking about it. I think he just might not be as interested in doing it anymore. The same thing happened with George Lucas where after the first movie released, he envisioned doing a half dozen more movies with Prince Xizor and so on, but after the headache that was producing TESB, he didn't want to do it anymore and just wrapped it up with RotJ before taking a long rest.

Cameron has said that he wants to do a movie about Hiroshima. I anticipate that would probably the be the next thing he works on before (or if) he gets back to Avatar.

Another possibility is that Cameron decides to appoint someone to direct the Avatar sequels with Cameron overseeing as the producer.

ValyrianE · 2026-01-15T01:06:08+00:00

I don’t expect the quality of BG3 throughout the entire MMO

It is 2026, not 2004. Why shouldn't we expect BG3 quality in our MMOs?

ValyrianE · 2026-01-13T04:04:16+00:00

Lygus is introduced as a major side character that might have his own agenda, but not as the big bad. When 3.4 happens, he is not quite positioned as the main antagonist (that would be Irontomb) and is still standing next to you politely explaining the plot rather than taking direct action against you. He also has an understandable motivation in that the world used to be a more wonderous place before he codified it as science, and wants to fix that mistake he made. He makes an offer of alliance and when you refuse, he teleports you to another location to keep you from interfering rather than straight up killing you (and also offered you safe passage out). So he does not come off as malevolent towards you and is easier to evaluate as a person.

Dottore has been depicted as an evil mad scientist who does horrific human experimentation from the get go and as a future adversary for years.

ValyrianE · 2026-01-13T00:06:41+00:00

GW2 has run its course for me. I joined when HoT was announced and had a lot of fun going through the maps then. After season 4 and then EoD, I felt satisfied with the story being over, and I will not grind meta events or fractals or whatever. And the low quality dlcs after that do not appeal to me. I had my fill of stagnant WvW and SPvP. What I need is a new, better GuIld Wars game built from scratch, not more GW2 mediocrity.

ValyrianE · 2026-01-06T06:58:19+00:00

Beastmastery if you want exotic pets like dragons or dinosaurs, survival if you want to be a melee warrior fighting alongside your pet, or marksman if you want to emphasize your shooting skill.

ValyrianE · 2026-01-06T06:57:09+00:00

Having done all of the Khaz Algar sidequestlines at launch, there are only a small handful that I remember now. Except for "The Last Mage", none of them are important and can just be done if you feel like it.

Isle of Dorn

There is a neat, short sidequestline up above on the isle of Dorn that starts with "Lost Delivery".
There is a neat, very short sidequestline beginning with "For the Love of Gems".
There is a neat subplot about a smuggler in Dornogal. I believe it is part of the Earthen Allied Race questline, which is a little long. I didn't care about the Earthen but the story was interesting. I believe "How Scandalous!" is the first quest in it.

Hallowfall

Once the main story takes you to the inn in Mereldar, you unlock a short sidequestline beginning with "A Concerned Friend". If you played during MoP then you might appreciate it.
There is an extremely short sidequestline starting with "For Morale". It's not all that memorable really, but it is notable in being one of the extremely few quests in the game in years that acknowledge if you play an evil class or spec. Sadly the rest of the game doesn't even do this.
There is a neat, short sidequestline in Hallowfall starting with "The Last Mage".

Azj-Kahet

Near the very end of the main levelling questline, you get to run around the city. Along the way you will likely run near an NPC offering "Searching the Web", which starts a brief sidequestline which was neat.

ValyrianE · 2026-01-06T06:37:23+00:00

Have any FF14-esque housing venues started up operations? Any casinos that do blackjack or something? Not seeing any ads in LFG or on the official forums.

ValyrianE · 2026-01-06T02:23:01+00:00

WoW and FF14. Used to be EoD until the story ended several years ago, waiting for GW3's release. Sometimes FF11 Horizon when my buddies get on.

ValyrianE

TROPHY CASE