I previously created this blog to post about topics related to Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo III. I also don’t update this part regularly, but over 8 years has passed since I had the title set as “by a (former) Diablo III player” since that was really based on that time in November 2015 when I quit everything Blizzard related. So as of November 2023, I changed the Diablo III to ARPG (since when I started this blog, I was primarily into ARPG’s but have moved heavily away from this genre in recent years). As of the start of 2024, I decided to pull back on gaming (and blogging about it) as a hobby.
Warning, the following will read like a mess of thoughts because it is pretty much just quick updates that took place over those time periods.
Most of the blog topics I’ve written (regarding the original Diablo III focus) have been verbose stream of conscious style walls-of-text-opinions (where I reserved the right to be wrong) that were also made on the official forums (because the official forums are poorly coded, I drafted most all of my posts here in Blogger’s editor instead; and eventually decided to make most of them public). After November 2015, I began posting about other gaming related topics that interested me. Note that I do not monetize this blog nor my YouTube channel. I blog just to purge what is in my head so it doesn’t further clutter up my already cluttered up mind. I also have investments in companies which I’m also openly critical of (that includes Activision Blizzard, Amazon which now owns Twitch, Apple, Microsoft, and a host of other tech related firms). Note: I divested my shares in Activision Blizzard in July 2021. I had a separate personal tech/investing related blog for that (yeah, I can write a lot of hot air) which has been merged into my current blog (April 2025).
As of June 2018, I’ve also learned that Blizzard will be updating their forum code/database which will also entail the archiving and removal of older posts (meaning A LOT of threads and the information associated with them will disappear except for whatever that remains cached or captured). Which means most source links in older posts here will “404” and become irrelevant without access to the original discussions.
I consider myself a casual gamer (I don’t play a wide range of games and choose to invest time in a very small set of titles which I find personally appealing in terms of aesthetics and satisfying/visceral combat). I tend to not get hyped about the marketing/PR of new releases and prefer being realistic.
As of November 2015, I stopped playing Diablo III and all Blizzard Entertainment games (the only other I played with any frequency were Heroes of the Storm and StarCraft II). I played the Legacy of the Void campaign only on the day of its release when I decided to just move on. Since 2014, my playtime consistently decreased; part of that was because I began playing this Korean MMO (Devilian) in the summer of 2014 that was attempting to be a Korean Diablo clone. I also created characters on the Thai server when it launched in May of 2015. The Korean service was shutdown in September of 2015 so I moved part of my play time onto the Thai server. I partially resumed playing TERA (which I had purchased the collectors edition when it was B2P) which I only played a little at launch but stopped playing again when Devilian was announced for NA/EU.
Let’s just say there’s a bunch of decisions made specifically in Diablo III and StarCraft II that I didn’t agree with (which sucked the fun out of those titles for me) where as a consumer, am voting with my wallet (and yes, I do exercise my ATVI shareholder rights as needed to attempt to invoke change). Thus even though my primary Blizzard account has collector edition licenses and associated special achievements, it was surprisingly easy to become detached from the company (where I was once an easy sell for their high margin SKU’s). Fast forward several years; the companies tone-deaf announcement of Diablo Immortal at BlizzCon 2018 and their terminating hundreds of positions company wide (despite one of their better fiscal quarters), is directly related to the higher level disconnect that permeates the company (and why I stepped away from their games in 2015).
Thus I began delving more into the happenings of Bluehole Studio (now simply known as Bluehole) instead (and discovering in the process that ignorance is often times bliss where sometimes, it is better off not knowing how the “sausage is made” especially when it comes to most Korean MMO titles that are being peddled off to the western market as a tail-end cash grab). As of November 2018, the parent (holding) company was renamed from Bluehole, Inc. to Krafton (Bluehole remains the name of the design studio overseeing TERA and Ascent: Infinite Realm).
My first dungeon crawler/hack and slash was (dating myself here), Zork. But it wasn’t until when Wizardry I: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord came out on the original IBM PC back in the early 80’s, that I became a huge aficionado of the genre. At the time, that particular game was a leap ahead in terms of game play; turned based but extremely fun and addictive – which led to countless hours of play.
While the Wizardry franchise itself ended up all but disappearing in the west, it took on a life of itself in Japan where it ended up becoming a rather popular MMO (Wizardry Online). While there was some promise of the game coming to the west (via Sony Online Entertainment), that premise never happened as the game was shuttered in 2014. Experience Inc. (formerly known as Team Muramasa; the development team at Experience Inc is now referred to as Team Muramasa) continues developing and publishing Wizardry-like clones in Japan primarily for the Japanese market (only 2 games were made available to the west).
My Battle.net BattleTag ID (originally Murasama-1820 but now LordMurasama as of August 2013) is a play on one of the most rarest/powerful weapons in the original game; the Muramasa Katana (Blade); yes, I intentionally swapped the “m” and “s” around. Muramasa Sengo was also a master swordsmith during Japan’s feudal era Muromachi period (1336-1573). I therefore ended up using variations of this name in other games (though it is also used by other players meaning I have to tack on things like Lord or other words/numbers onto it). Murasama is not a proper name which can lead to all sorts of confusion with native Japanese since “sama” itself is an honorific in addition to the “Lord” part that I’ve had to resort to when it comes to naming conflicts in games and/or platforms.
While I also played other dungeon crawlers like Rogue, Ultima, Gauntlet, Heroes of Might and Magic, and other similar titles, it really wasn’t until when Diablo was released in 1996, that I again found myself playing something for hours upon end (a cycle that ended up being repeated for Diablo II and the Lord of Destruction expansion). Diablo III (pre-expansion) has been a mixed bag though (where the majority of my game play was from release through just before patch 1.0.4; pre-Paragon).
As of December 2015, I had been primarily playing the North American and European version of Devilian (developed by South Korean game developer Bluehole Ginno and published by Trion World’s). This version was shutdown on March 5, 2018. I am currently playing Bluehole’s TERA (publisher – En Masse Entertainment and then taken over by Gameforge) (closed down in June 2022) as well as SoulWorker (Gameforge NA and Hangame Japan), global MapleStory 2 (closed down), Guild Wars 2 (occasionally), and Lost Ark (barely no longer play).
As of 2021, I’ve been playing ArcheAge Unchained (as of the November 2023 service merge, it is now just ArcheAge), Genshin Impact, Tower of Fantasy, and Honkai: Star Rail (these three gacha games, I do not spend money to pull characters).
As of April 2022, I began becoming more heavily involved with the leaked official (actual Bluehole signed) server binaries for TERA PC (which for my personal usage, I call TERA Offline) as a side hobby.
As of June 2024, the western version of ArcheAge was also shutdown (ending a decade long period of becoming more involved with KMMO’s, and playing them in my own way); this served as one of the final catalysts to move away from gaming in general.
I am also the site administrator for Devilian-Info (which will serve as an information repository for Devilian to ensure that it won’t be completely forgotten). I will also be migrating this site (which unfortunately remains in a partially completed state) off of Google.
May 2025: an archive of the original Blogger site has been migrated to WordPress