Lonely Echoes

I hate it when one of my favorite blogs goes inactive.  I get used to reading certain sites and end up looking forward to checking back with them each day.  So, when someone quits posting for whatever reason, it’s kind of like when a friend leaves an MMO for reasons unknown.  Your personal experience goes on, but you miss that old friend from time to time.

Still, I try my best to keep my links up to date.  I know that when I click a link on someone else’s site, I find it a little frustrating when it leads to a dead space or a site that hasn’t been updated in a year or more.  I do try to give a little lee-way just in case the person in question is busy or burned out or whatever, but I have established a mental shut-off time frame of 4 months.  If a site I link goes inactive for 4 months, it’s time to say goodbye.

So, while I hated to do it, I have removed Mrryx’s Gaming Journal from my links.  I do hope to see that site become active again some day, but at the same time, I do know that we’ll all walk away from blogging as well as playing MMO’s eventually.  Maybe it was just his time.

I don’t have much to report myself today.  Last night saw some very slight game time.  I made some food and drink on my provisioner and went resource hunting with Rao in The Sinking Sands.  For resources, I have grown to hate this zone as it seems to have turned into everyone’s favorite spot for harvesting.  I was actually used to the ore spawns being permanently camped.  Pop an ore node in The Sinking Sands and it is like dropping a piece of chocolate on the ground near an ant hill.  The last few days though, I haven’t been able to find much of anything.

I generally loved going to the Twin Tears when I needed wood, hides or roots because wood is generally in abundance at one and roots at the other with a fair mix of creature dens at both.  The last 2 nights, both of these spots have been completely devoid of nodes.

I swam out to some of the islands that were typically deserted before and they have had at least 2 harvesters per island the last couple of nights.

So, my harvest time has been largely unsuccessful.  The flip side is that my shiny gathering has been a bit more productive.  I’ve actually found a few that Rao was missing and picked up several that have gone nuts on the bazaar lately.  I don’t know if the recent introduction of being given the choice to pick up a shiny or leave it has caused many people to just leave them or what the deal is, but fairly common shinies from The Sinking Sands that were selling for a gold or less a few months back are now going for over a plat on my server.

And, oddly enough, they seem to be selling fairly well.  I dropped 5 of a particular item on the bazaar matching the 1 plat price with the lowest non-lowballer on the broker and all 5 were gone in less than an hour.  It’s not that it is uncommon either because I found 3 more over the next 30 minutes and another 6 of them last night.

Not that I’m complaining.  Suits me just fine.

Anyway, I expect my gaming time will continue to be sparse until I get this test behind me.  Once that is complete, I’ll have a break of about a month before I start working on the next test as the study books for the next exam don’t even get published until the end of May.  But, until this first test is behind me, my weeknights will probably continue to be short stints online during study breaks.

That’s okay though.  Just grabbing short teasers during the week makes me look forward to the weekends when I can really dive in again.  Keeps things fresh.