In fact, not wanting babies was our thing, if you can call it that. We'd watch stressed out parents as their kids throw one tantrum after another at the supermarket and we'd laugh at them. Yes, we're dicks like that. And there are plenty of great reasons why I don't consider the two of us suitable parent material. The whole sitting around naked and playing video games till 5 in the morning, every day of the week thing. The 101 ways of having fun with a toothbrush (you don't wanna know). Staying awake in bed all night, talking about which of our (female!) friends we'd invite for a threesome. Pissing contests. Buying bigger and scarier reptiles all the time. Our weird jobs. Our constant cashflow problems. Just to name a few.
But all trolling, stupid jokes and fretting aside, the whole thing is actually a pretty hot topic in our household, especially since the missus is notoriously late for her period. All the time. Every month. Or every two months, because sometimes she simply decides to skip one. I don't even know how the hell she's doing that, but it has happened a lot over the years and I just accept it without wanting to get into the science behind it. Some things I just don't wanna know.
But here's the crazy part. I had a lot of time to think about the whole thing, about us, our situation and when the whole conversation came up again, I said: "You know, if it were to happen, I'd just go for it. In fact, if you asked me if I wanted to, I'd say yes." And to my great surprise, her answer was: "You know, I've been having similar thoughts lately."
This is a whole new situation for me. I have never, not in a million years, felt any desire to start a family. I've been with a few girls in my life, but my feelings for them rarely went beyond, "I care about you, but if you died, I'd probably hump your younger sister."
But some messed up part of my brain was doing the reality check and assessed the situation with The Bear. We've been a couple for over a half decade now. We've been through every crisis together, be it financial, emotional or due to lousy health. And we're more in love than we've ever been. We tell each other every day. Not because it sounds nice. Not because it's what couples should do. We look at each other, when we say it. We kiss. We mean it.
And all cheesiness aside, why the hell not? We pay our bills on time, we have our jobs, we're taking good care of our home and our animals - the thought simply doesn't scare me or stress me out anymore.
Now now. There's no need to panic. We're not actually planning anything right now. But it turns out the whole thing is not as 'off the table' as we had thought it would be.
As for the whole Neverwinter exploit drama:
The official website has a funny new post, which contains this little snippet here: "...this past weekend, the Neverwinter community helped us to identify a major exploit involving the Auction House and Astral Diamond Exchange..."
Right. This past weekend. Ironically, this exploit had been in the game since day one and even then it was neither new, nor was it entirely unknown to Cryptic. Because the exact same exploit happened in Star Trek Online a year ago:
What you see here is a list of auctions, which have been listed at a negative buyout price. And, believe it or not, it works exactly like this: If you hit the buy button on any of these offers, you will receive currency rather than spend any. And get the item on top of it.
People could list these negative prices and generate currency out of nowhere by utilising a bug through the so-called 'Gateway', a website, which allows you to handle all of your auctions, among other ingame functions. It also fails to check whether you try to list stuff for prices below zero. And the exact same thing has now happened in Neverwinter.
Oh well. Last Sunday, the exploit had gone viral, every moron, their mothers and their dogs had abused said exploit and then they started handing out free cats, aka one of the most expensive, powerful pets in the game. The exploiters did. To random players. And Cryptic went for a 7 hour rollback, which undid the whole "Caturday" thing. They're handing out free capes as an apology, too:
Nope, not a joke. This is actually happening.
Of course this does absolutely nothing to stop players who were already abusing the broken gateway before the exploit had become public knowledge. Cryptic state they're going after these guys individually, braggarts on reddit claim they've not been caught and/or received 72 hour bans, while all their ill-gotten gains had been safely put away on mule accounts, which had not been wiped, banned or affected in any way whatsoever.
So who is telling the truth here? Are Cryptic actually capable of catching all the exploiters or are they as powerless as the supposed exploiters claim to be? Fuck if I know. And frankly, I don't even give a shit. Unfortunately, I'm feeling a bit lonely with that attitude right now.
When you take a look at the forums right now, the Neverwinter Facebook-Page or their twitter, you'll see a whole lot of raging nerds demanding a complete server wipe. And for all the wrong reasons.
Don't get me wrong. What they want actually makes sense at first glance. They argue that the rollback didn't affect those exploiters, who muled off their currency. They also argue that people have been (and still are) using other exploits, which allow groups to skip dungeon bosses, one-shot dungeon-bosses, do all kinds of shit to broken and bugged dungeon bosses for loot. They also claim that with so many people owning vast amounts of currency and/or powerful endgame items, they control the market, they set the prices in the auction house and they own the entire economy.
And here's why it's all bullshit:
Rollbacks affect all characters, mules or otherwise
When the entire game was rolled back to state before the exploit went viral, of course it affects every single character on every single server. For some messed up reason, people are under the impression that characters got rolled back individually. You can even see that in zone chat and on the forums right now: "Why did my character get rolled back when I didn't exploit?" "Why was only one of my characters rolled back?" It doesn't work that way. The entire game had been reset to an earlier state in time, specificially, seven hours before the servers had been shut down. And that affects every single account, every character, the auction house, the whole economy. If you haven't touched your character within these seven hours, then the rollback won't have any noticeable effect on you, but it still happened. And no matter, whether exploiters kept all their currency on their main characters or spread their stuff over a hundred different mule accounts - if they did any of this within the last seven hours before shutdown, it has been undone. The only mules who (supposedly) weren't affected are those belonging to exploiters, who have been abusing these bugs long before they had become public knowledge. And that's an entirely different matter. Cryptic state they're going after these players, while the exploiters say they can't be caught. And you want a rollback, because some random stranger on reddit claims he got away with it?
A wipe won't magically fix every exploit in the game
Many people on the forums demand a wipe, because lots of people exploit the crappy AI and the broken dungeons to their advantage. It's perfectly possible to skip 15 minutes of trash battles in the Lair of the Pirate King, simply by jumping through some rocks, which have no collisions enabled and allow you to take a major shortcut. The final boss encounter in the Spider Temple takes part near a gaping pit. I tanked that boss, got knocked down into the pit, the boss jumped after me, we both died, end of dungeon. Thing is, I get to respawn and the boss does not, so my group still won. Also a known exploit by now. People are rightfully pissed off at these exploits and demand a complete server wipe, because players abusing said exploits are gaining an unfair advantage.
See the hole in that logic?
THE FUCKING EXPLOITS ARE STILL THERE! What exactly would a wipe do to fix that? 2-3 days later people would farm the endgame dungeons all over again, use the exact same AI and map exploits and control the market all over again.
The value of gear on the auction house makes no difference to an individual player
Here's a fun one: Some people are annoyed with the huge amount of epic endgame items on the auction house causing their value to drop drastically. If there's only one Magical Longsword of Greater Kill Everything +12 on the auction house, you might be able to sell it for several million astral diamonds. But now there's a whole lot of people farming dungeons, there's a hundred of these longswords up for sale on the AH and as a direct result of the greater supply and weaker demand, prices have fallen from X million diamonds to something around 50k. Boo, right?
Wrong!
Sure, you might have looted one of these swords and now you're pissed off because you can't sell it for very much. But you don't have to! Let's say you want to sell that longsword, because you're a wizard and you'd much rather have an epic new staff or whatever the fuck you casting pansies are into these days. And you're in luck! In an economy, where magical longswords cost next to nothing, due to their massive supply, it's a safe bet that equally powerful magical sticks are just as cheap and available. Sell your longsword for a crappy 50k and go buy that fucking staff! No harm done! Just because you're working with smaller numbers doesn't mean you can't buy the same amount of stuff as before.
And this also works the other way 'round:
Let's say some greedy exploiter runs around with several billion diamonds and uses them to buy all the epic shit on the AH, then puts it all back up for a hundred times their original price. Nothing but ridiculously expensive items everywhere. Awful, right?
Wrong again! Go play a fucking dungeon. Loot some fucking epics. Takes about twenty minutes. Put the fucking epic on the fucking AH and BAM! Charge 20 million diamonds for it. If some rich fucker dictates the prices, you too can sell your stuff for millions. And when you sell off unwanted epix for millions, you can spend those on the stuff you do want. The only thing that changes is the numbers you're playing with, but you're still trading unwanted epics for wanted ones through the auction house. Low prices, high prices, it makes no fucking difference.
Of course this does not apply to people, who only spend cold, harsh RL-cash on the auction house. If you're too stupid and lazy to obtain the odd bit of epic gear to generate some AH-currency, then higher AH prices will effectively force you to spend more real money to gear up. But honestly - if you never run any dungeons, why the fuck would you want epic items in the first place? What are you gonna do with them, stand around in town or run the odd foundry quest, which is so easy to solo, you could do it naked?
And then there is the usual amount of self-entitled dipshits, who spend well over 250 Euros on a Free2Play game, then decide they want their money back and every excuse is good enough. I had a good laugh at this sucker.
-Cat
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