Video Games - Things I Bought with Diablo 3

I bought Diablo 3 about a year ago not because it's a good game, but more of an economic experiment.  The real money auction house (RMAH) intrigued me as it was the only game at the time (and I think still is the only the game) that allows people to sell their loot to other people for real money without having to go through a third party like eBay.

I wanted to see if I could make an appreciable amount of money by playing the game whether through actual grinding of content or auction house flipping.  To start things off I bought the game using money from selling a bunch of MTGO tickets.  For those who don't play MTGO, tickets are sort of an unofficial in-game currency.  You normally obtain them by buying them from the MTGO store but if you speculate on card values well, you can actually gain tickets which I did rather successfully (an aside, when I figured this out I financed an entire year's worth of drafts and online release tournaments with an initial investment of something like $20).

Warhamer 40k - New Deathwing models

I managed to find some time to start putting some new Deathwing models together (from the box my sister sent me a few weeks ago).  I have to say that the box was quite impressive considering all the parts and weapons and stuff on the sprue.  Here's a preview pic of what I did.

Sadly I still don't think the box is worth the price tag GW is asking (no disrespect to my sister, it was a very thoughtful gift and I will enjoy it immensely).  The hobby has really become a luxury that I definately cannot afford on a regular basis.  Thankfully I have a large 40k army already so I won't need to actually buy anything for years to come (when they make Deathwing terminators 15 points a piece, then maybe I will need to buy more).

League of Legends - Grouping Up

League is getting fun again.  After a few days of struggling to climb Silver V and getting nowhere, I decided to stop playing ranked and try something else.  As I mentioned in my last League of Legends post, I convinced my friends to get futuristic skins/champions and we could all play as a themed team.  It was quite fun and we managed a few wins against some random folk.  No ranked play as only two of us have lv30 accounts (our midlaner is almost 30 but our top laner and support are only 15 and 8 respectively).

Our current set up is (our summoner names in brackets)

• Top lane (Salcomine) - Galactic Renekton
• Jungle (Deathwing40k) - Galactic Nasus
• Midlane (ManEatingDuck)- Cryocore Brand
• ADC (Eloesha) - Pulsefire Ezrael
• Support (alexwarrior) - iBlitzcrank

Mind you if we're not all together we just play whatever.  I've gotten really good at playing Miss Fortune, especially when paired up with our iBlitzcrank support.  Those rocket grabs and power fist knock ups give me so much time to just unleash Miss Fortune's abilities on to the poor unfortunate soul.  Of course almost any ADC will work well with Blitzcrank's style of support.  Salcomine plays a lot of Malphite which works really well with my junglers (usually Xin or Jarvan) so we have some awesome initiates which are devastating if our team capitalizes.

Did I stop my attempt to get to Gold division?  Hardly, I just don't grind ranked games anymore.  I've taken to playing one ranked game every day or every other day.  So far it's been working great and I'm on a win streak (finally!).  Still in Silver V but slowly earning league points and about half way to the promotion series.  In the meanwhile I've taken to playing ARAM games.

I'm very glad that ARAM queues got implemented too as it gives me something to do in between ranked games that's kind of relaxing.  It's strangely satisfying to roll a totally random champion and then just fight the other team.  No jungle to worry about, no ganks to worry about, just fighting.