Playing Path of Exile and Curating HIVE Gaming

Hello to my fellow Hivians and hello to the Hive Gaming Community!

I just wanted to take the time to introduce myself to the HIVE Gaming Community. My main account is Hive account@hurtlocker. I joined HIVE in January 2022, mostly to play Splinterlands. I love Splinterlands because it fixes a problem a lot of trading card games have. Most digital trading card games you do not own anything. I used to play Hearthstone and was regularly in the top tier. I was very good at taking decks that were at the top of the meta and adjusting these decks with cheaper cards to be able to punch way above my weight. I hit legendary rank once with a relatively cheap deck. I never spent a $1 on Hearthstone but got into legendary which is pretty awesome. Unfortunately this was all for bragging rights and I never made anything financial off Hearthstone. My Hearthstone collection, for all technical purposes, is worthless. I used to play trading card games when I was younger. The issue with real world trading cards is, they are very hard to sell. Even when you do sell physical trading cards, people rarely pay "Market Price" cause they want to flip them for a profit. Splinterlands is unique because it is a lot easier to buy and sell cards through their marketplace when compared to a traditional card game. Also, you can make trades on the market and do not need to trade in a traditional sense where someone can just take your cards and run away. I avoid player 2 player trades in online games for this reason. To me it is a lot less risky to go through a marketplace.

I was a Splinterlands player first but now I am more of a Hivian. I believe I will buy Splinterlands stuff again one day, but right now I need less distractions and it was better for me personally to sell a lot of my stuff at a "loss" so I could focus on other things. I do not recommend other people do this but this is what I do. I lose money all the time and a lot of times it is to make sure I have capital to TRY to make more money somewhere else. I do not have a 4D chess investment approach. I don't really make big plans, I just try to position my self for success while also leaving room for me to pivot. Sometimes I cannot pivot out of my trades and I essentially just dig a hole by pivoting in circles 😅

Might be too much information, but this is my blog and writing in a way I enjoy is very important to making sure my blog is sustainable FOR ME. It is hard for me to write something that is interesting to me and the reader if I am only posting for max rewards.

I actually enjoy curating a lot more than writing posts. I think curating works better with my personality. But writing "good" content I enjoy, is a very important part of me using HIVE. I need to have a good relationship with the HIVE chain and be a good stakeholder if I want to increase the chances my HIVE investment is going to be successful. Also, having fun on HIVE is very important to me. Posting in HIVE Gaming seems like a win win for me and I hope to do it more going forward.

So next, I want to talk about PoE 2. I am huge fan of Diablo 3. I am not a big fan of Diablo 4 for a few reasons that are not worth getting into. Don't get me wrong, Diablo 4 is an awesome game. But I am not a fan of Diablo 4 in the same way I was a fan of Diablo 3. Diablo 3 actually had a marketplace at one point where you could sell items for real world money through Blizzard. They ended up shutting it down but I was able to buy the Diablo 3 expansion by selling some things on the marketplace.

So I naturally like PoE because it is so similar to the Diablo franchise. One issue I have with PoE is it has way too many options for a casual gamer. I am more of a casual gamer these days because I do not have as much time to really get in the zone and play for 3+ hour intervals.

When picking my character, I went with Sorceress. I like wizard style characters and prefer ice magic when playing games like this. Historically when I played Diablo 3 I would either play a character that has a lot of burn damage or a character that has a lot of freezing abilities. I tend to be more of glass cannon style player where I have a lot of DPS while constantly dodging attacks from enemies.

I picked the standard mode. I am not really sure what the difference is between all of the modes. I understand what hardcore is but my internet connection is not consistent enough for me to be comfortable with hardcore. Losing a hardcore character due to internet connection is no fun LOL

I did get past the first few checkpoints fairly quickly. The Bloated Miller was a nice easy boss to play around with. I took a couple of hits because I did not dodge quickly enough and I was trying to take screenshots at the same time. 😅

One thing I like about this game is, it has a lot of tips that automatically pop up to help guide new players. I remember when I played PoE a while back I had issues with learning everything solo. I would still like to get tips from the HIVE Gaming community on how to play but I will likely avoid copying other people who have setup their skill points for max effectiveness.

The screenshot below shows a part of the game which is a huge pro for me. It shows me what a new skill will look like based on my own character and gives a lot of detail on what the skill does. I started with fire style damage but am going to transition to ice style attacks when it makes sense for me to do so.

The below picture is a good example of what I do not like about PoE. Like options are great don't get me wrong. I love me some options and customization. But the skill tree is wild 😆. I am sure I will get the hang of it eventually but right now I am a bit overwhelmed with all the different directions I can go.

I originally wanted to add more to this post about PoE, but I think it would be good for me to take my time learning PoE in a way I enjoy. I noticed there is a guild option. I typically like to play solo but if we have a HIVE gaming guild on PoE, I would like to join. If there is not a HIVE gaming guild and no one wants to be the Guild Leader I will happily start one. I have a good experience managing competitive gaming guilds and casual gaming guilds. I prefer to manage casual gaming guilds because those are more sustainable and people are generally happier. If we mess up on something as a guild, it is a lot more fun and silly when we are casual players vs trying to be the "best."

I like to curate communities if I like a particular type of content and I want to see more of it on HIVE. Upvoting content is one of the best ways to encourage people to keep doing what they are doing. I like to curate things people enjoy writing about. However, I do not simply curate based on a specific criteria. I am not a robot so I do not look at everything the same way every day. How I am feeling usually impacts what I do on HIVE.

Things I will look for when upvoting content in Hive Gaming:

1. Is the account that is posting a "good" stakeholder that cares about the ecosystem long-term? There are different ways to approach this but the easiest and most objective way is referencing a users KE.

2. Is this original HIVE content or are you cross posting between platforms? If someone just drops a link to twitch or provides a youtube video with no blog content I can read, I do not usually upvote this content.

3. Post frequency. If you post more than once in a day, I hyper analyze both posts. If people do this, sometimes they get downvoted (not necessarily by me). I am not a huge fan of the 1 post a day standard. To me it is pretty obscure and not really objective. I think the real issue is when people post more than once in a day and it is "low quality" content. Either way, that 1 post a day standard is pretty well established and I have no intention of getting involved in that. I usually only upvote people that post max once a day.

4. Is there an English version in your post? For me translators are fine, you will just want to reference the translator you are using. For one, this is just a good muscle to have. Referencing the work of others (like the translator app you are using) is just a nice thing to do. It also makes it easier for other users who are not English speaking to see which translators are available.

5. Engagement. If people leave comments but you do not respond to comments I think that is kind of a bummer. Engagement is sometimes big on posts but it is a mixed bag depending on who the poster is.

Things I will NOT look for when upvoting content in Hive Gaming:

1. Rewards on the post. There are people in the ecosystem today that upvote or downvote content based on rewards. Some people look for "under rewarded" posts and some people look for "over rewarded" posts. I think the decision to curate up or down based on rewards is legitimate. Even if I think that activity is legitimate, I do not curate based on over or under rewarded posts because that style of curation is not aligned with my CURRENT curation objectives.

2. Wordcount is not important to me. You can have really concise awesome posts or really long posts that are hard to follow. Also, people providing a translated version adds wordcount to the post; I am not going to upvote something just because it has more words due to a translated version lol.

3. High quality content. High quality is super subjective. I care more about if the account is a good stakeholder and if they have engagement / interesting conversations in the comment section of their posts.

Side notes:

1. I regularly use the downvote button on HIVE. I talk about downvotes way more than I want to already. I am not going to get deep into downvotes in this post but if you want to talk about what I downvote and why I can let you know in the comments. If you do get downvoted by me or someone else, I have 2 tips. (1) If you are mad, step away from HIVE until you have a cool head. (2) Don't ping a bunch of whales. Whales get a stupid amount of pings and most do not like getting pinged unless it involves them.

2. I do not believe there is anything in this post that qualifies as "Adult Content" (see rule 3 on the about page for the Hive Gaming community). If PoE content needs to be tagged as NSFW please let me know.

If you think I missed anything in this post or you just want to ask me questions in the comments, go for it! I like meeting new people on HIVE and like having interesting conversations.

Cheers,
Hurt